Round 2: DING!!!!

I love the playoffs!  God I love them!  More than sunshine and Hawkins cheezies!  I love them so damn much I couldn't be bothered finding out when the second round started!  Yep, that's true love and not that stuff they talk about in Nicolas Sparks novels, but only because hockey doesn't have cancer.

All is not lost though!  Wait, were you thinking all was lost or something?  Jeez.  It's spring.  Relax okay?  Okay?  Okay.  Instead, we're going to try something different.  I'm going to make all my predictions for the second round based entirely on the first games.  I guess it's not that different, since they do that after every game anyways on TSN and Sportsnet, but it'll be different here because we're going to attempt to see, with a short sample size of course, exactly how indicative one game is of the rest of the series.  I'm less interested in my own predicting ability, since obviously it should be much better than the first round (and if it's not I can simply blame the team that choked away a 1-0 series lead!), and more interested in how much we can predict based on one game.

Detroit vs. San Jose.

I didn't watch this game at all until the last three minutes so we're not off to a good start.  I was at work and even Bell TV didn't think the game was on, it thought I was watching Sportscentre.  San Jose wins 4-3 but led 3-0 at one point, so we can easily conclude that Thornton played soft, Nabakov probably only faced five shots and Joe Pavelski incredibly managed to put up four goals and four assists.  A cursory glance at the boxscore shows that some of these things are not true and Thornton in fact put up a +36DD Softness Quotient which is, of course, league average.  If you were to pick this series on mental toughness you'd take Detroit in three, but given that the Sharks overcame the Dan Boyle goal against Colorado (and really, the series wasn't that close afterwards), maybe San Jose is pulling it together.  Even though they almost choked away last night's game, maybe it's a sigh of San Jose's new found ability to handle adversity instead of shrink away from it.  Of course, Detroit handled way more adversity this year than San Jose, and have players who always show up in the playoffs, as evidenced last night, so this is a tricky one.  Detroit in 7, goaltending issues on both sides cancel themselves out and Detroit's superior net-crashers are the difference.