For Oilers, Panthers and other truly elite NHL teams, the regular season doesn't matter much

New York Times

2 days ago

DALLAS — Dustin Brown laughed at the question, at the very idea of it, at the possibility that a reporter could have such a limited understanding of the game of hockey, of the nature of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
During the 2014 Western Conference final, the Los Angeles captain — who was in the midst of playing 64 extra games in a 26-month span — was asked why his Kings were so impressive in the postseason, but so ordinary in the regular season. After all, they were the No. 8 seed in the West in 2012, the No. 5 seed in 2013, the No. 6 seed in 2014. Hardly dominant. And yet they won the Stanley Cup in 2012, reached the conference final in 2013, and were on their way to another championship in 2014. They were a team of wrecking balls, playing the heaviest brand of hockey we've seen in the salary-cap era. The Kings didn't just beat you, they beat you up. They beat you down. They beat you into a pulp.
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So why weren't they winning their division every year? Why weren't they contending for the Presidents' Trophy?
'You can't play this way for 82 games,' Brown said. 'You'd never survive. You have to save this for the playoffs. We're a playoff team, not a regular-season team.'
Full disclosure: I was the reporter asking the question. Hey, sometimes you have to sacrifice your dignity for a good answer. That same postseason, I posed a similar question to Chicago's Bryan Bickell, who was a perennial disappointment in the regular season and a perennial monster in the playoffs. He gave basically the same answer: If he played like that for 82 games, he'd have nothing left when the games actually counted.
In the fall of 2015, following the Blackhawks' Kings-like run of Cup, conference final, Cup, I asked Marián Hossa during training camp if he ever showed up for the start of a season and thought to himself, 'I can't believe I have to go through all this again.' He chuckled.
'It's a long, long season,' he said. 'At this stage of my career, I kind of wish I could just skip ahead to the playoffs.'
He was hardly alone.
There comes a point in every great team's trajectory at which they're hit with the career-altering realization that, well, the regular season doesn't mean squat. The Presidents' Trophy is worthless. Seeding is meaningless. Home-ice advantage is not a big deal. All that matters is the playoffs — getting there and getting there as healthy as you possibly can. And yes, sometimes that means coasting for long stretches of games. Of weeks. Of months, even. Sometimes that means some half-hearted efforts against lesser teams. Sometimes that means losing streaks and standings drops.
It can send fans into a panic or a rage, with torches and pitchforks always at the ready. But that panic never reaches the locker room. Not the locker room of a team that's been there, done that.
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Look, I'm not here to say the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers don't care about the regular season. That's too glib, too harsh. But there's a reason the Panthers never blinked when they went 7-10-1 over the final month of the season, losing seven of their last 10 games and plummeting from first in the Atlantic Division and second in the Eastern Conference to third in the Atlantic (10 points behind Toronto) and fifth in the East. Or when they lost six of seven in November, for that matter. Florida always knew that when the temperature rose, its level would, too. Sure enough, they have a chance to repeat as Stanley Cup champions after losing just five games in three rounds.
Same with Edmonton. Oilers Nation was gritting its teeth over a two-month run from Jan. 30 to March 27 that saw its team go 9-11-2, falling from first in the Pacific and second in the West to third in the Pacific and sixth in the West. The preseason favorite to win it all — nearly half of The Athletic staffers picked Edmonton to win the Cup in our preseason predictions — looked like anything but a contender. But the Oilers met it all with a shrug. They knew that come April, come the games that mattered, they had what it took — on the ice and between the ears — to make another run to the Stanley Cup Final. And here they are, back in the Final against those same Panthers, after a thorough dismantling of the Dallas Stars. They've won 12 of their last 14 in these playoffs.
At the end of the regular season, exactly one staffer at The Athletic still picked Edmonton to win it all. And one staffer picked Florida. That's it. We should have known better. The Oilers and Panthers did.
The fact is, to a great team, home ice is nice. But it's not a must.
'The regular season is a long, mental grind,' Oilers forward Adam Henrique said. 'Maybe even more so than physical sometimes. And when teams are in their window to win, they're playing a lot of hockey year after year after year. When you're in that window, people always expect to see (you) at the top of the regular-season standings and then run through the playoffs. But that doesn't happen as much anymore. Typically, the Presidents' Trophy winner doesn't win the Stanley Cup. It's just having an understanding, being able to have a mature group that can go on the road and just take care of business, knowing what you have to do in order to win — that says a lot about a team. It's not do or die just to have home ice throughout the playoffs.'
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Henrique went to the Stanley Cup Final as a rookie with the New Jersey Devils in 2012, playing 24 extra games and getting a sense of how different — how much harder, how much more physical, how much more exhausting — playoff hockey was. When he came back a couple of months later for training camp, he couldn't believe how 'mentally tired' he still was. Fitness testing? Eight preseason games? Eighty-two regular-season games? Just to get back to the start of a potentially two-month playoff run? Really?
And that was just his second season. Now imagine that a decade into your career.
'I feel great,' Connor McDavid countered. 'It's a blessing to play this much hockey over the last couple of years.'
OK, yeah, well, futuristic, state-of-the-art hockey Terminators don't count in this discussion.
'You want to feel good about your game down the stretch going into the playoffs, for sure,' Henrique said. 'But you want to be healthy, and that takes priority if you're in a good position to allow yourself to take those extra days or games off. There's a lot that goes into it, rather than just trying to be the No. 1 seed.'
Fans hate to hear about teams 'flipping the switch' come the postseason. It feels disrespectful somehow, to the game, to those buying tickets to all those regular-season games. But the great teams — the tested teams — really do flip the switch. Pretty easily, in fact. It's what separates them from the pack. You can look at the Stars and say that they lost in the conference final for the third straight spring. Or you can look at them and say they won two playoff series in each of the last three years. That's still quite a feat. And one that seemed like a long shot when they limped into the 2025 postseason having lost seven straight games in dreadful fashion. Stars fans were borderline despondent, expecting Colorado to steamroll their team.
Dallas wasn't sweating any of it, though. Dallas knew better.
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'What happened with us is, we had a couple really weird, tough losses toward the end, and then we got too far away from Winnipeg (in the battle for first place),' Matt Duchene said. 'It was unrealistic that we could catch them. And you go into a lull, right? You're in purgatory. Colorado wasn't going to catch us and we weren't going to catch Winnipeg. That's why we had the slump we had near the end. But I got asked about it before Game 1 against Colorado, and I sloughed it off, and we played a pretty good game that night. And then we won the next two and we're off to the races. We have a veteran group in here. You don't want to put yourself in a position to have to flip the switch, but sometimes maybe you have to.'
It helps when you know you can. When you've done it before, over and over. Only a handful of teams are good enough for long enough to reach that point.
In all the years I've been covering the NHL, I think of one player comment more than any other. It came from Patrick Sharp, the longtime Blackhawks great, when he was with the Dallas Stars toward the end of his career. Lips get looser once you leave a team, especially as you near the end of your career, and I had asked Sharp point-blank if those great Blackhawks teams cared even the slightest bit about the regular season. I had spent all those years ginning up concerns about a disjointed power play, or a hole at second-line center, or a potential goaltending controversy. And all the while, I got the sense that it was just me and the fans going through all the histrionics. Those Blackhawks rarely, if ever, seemed to get caught up in any of it.
And so I go back to Sharp's answer frequently, even when I'm wondering what I'm doing spending four hours on a flight and two nights in a hotel just to watch some ultimately meaningless regular-season game in San Jose.
'When you're in the playoffs, you have a job to do and you put everything else aside and you focus on that job,' Sharp said. 'You're not really caught up in how many games we've played or how tired we may be. But you feel it in training camp the next year. You feel it in those 'big' regular-season games in October, November, December, January that really aren't that big. Yeah, the Blackhawks go into Washington to play the Capitals in January, that's a 'big game.' But it's really not a big game when you were just in the Stanley Cup Final a couple months ago. It was harder for guys to get up for the day-to-day grind of the regular season when we were going deep in the playoffs like that. Maybe that's why you saw the slumps in February and March.
'I don't think 'cruise control' is even the right way to put it. You still want to play, and you want to score, and you want to win, but it's almost like, holy s—, we're really doing this again? Here? Wednesday night in Carolina? And the other team is fired up, because the Blackhawks are in town. They're playing their best and they want to beat you. It's just tough to do it every night.'
It's a lesson worth remembering next season, when the Panthers or Oilers or Stars or Hurricanes or Lightning or Golden Knights go through a dry January or a feeble February. They haven't all won the Cup, but they all know what it takes. And most importantly, when it takes it. For the league's truly elite teams, it's just a matter of getting in. Top seed or sixth seed, home ice or no home ice, red hot coming in or ice cold, it just doesn't matter. They know where the switch is, and you can be damn sure they'll find it.
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The regular season is for the Maple Leafs of the world, the Jets, the Senators, the Kings, the Capitals and the Flames — all still trying to prove they can be one of those elite teams — and for all the also-rans trying to find their way back into the postseason. Let them expend all that energy and all that emotion. The truly great teams know to save it for when it matters most. For the playoffs. For right now.
(Photo of Oilers' Adam Henrique and Stuart Skinner: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)