Injuries kept haunting the whole organization throughout the season, but luckily not as badly in spring as they did in autumn. In regular season the Preds managed to take 2nd place in the Conference, the Canucks took the 1st place and the President's Trophy too. In AHL the Admirals also got in the playoffs for the first time in this challenge and in ECHL the Cyclones won the Brabham Cup also for the first time in this challenge.
In playoffs we faced the Oilers in the Quarter Finals. Afterwards it turned out they were the toughest piece in the whole playoffs for us. It took all seven games to win them. Next opponent was the Flames, who were missing badly Miikka Kiprusoff, who was out with an injury. As his injury wasn't very bad and he was coming back any day, we played all the games like they were the 7th game of the Stanley Cup finals. We were able to win them straight in four games and moved forward in the Conference finals against the Canucks.
The Canucks were a difficult opponent too. Especially their 1st line center Olli Jokinen dominated the beginning of the series and I had to change our tactics and lines again and again. In this series I used succesfully some defensive tactics first time in this year's playoffs. Finally we won 4-2, we took the last three games and our game started to look at least promising.
In Stanley Cup finals we played against the Penguins, who defeated last year's finalists, Rangers in the Conference finals. As the Penguins had been 7th in East, we had the home advantage. I thought keeping the advantage would be very important, but obviously the team thought otherwise. Team played a lazy game and on top of all Ryan Getzlaf took 14 minutes (2 and 2+10 minutes) penalties in 3rd period when we were one goal behind. And after I gave him an official warning of poor performance, he was so unhappy he produced only one goal and two assists in the whole final series. (Now I'm a little unfair, his AvR from the final series was 6-8-10-9-8.) In the first game we had Jeremy Smith as our starting goalie (he played in 9 games in the playoffs, won five of them and lost two). For the game #2 I changed Karri Rämö as our starter and changed to default finesse defensive tactics. We won the game 2-0 and Rämö got his first playoff shutout in NHL. After this encouraging result we kept on playing with default defensive tactics (finesse and physical and in some game with neutral zone trap for a while) and won the series in five games. In the last game Rämö played his second shutout. In five games the Penguins were able to score only nine goals against our 17. Up yours, Sid and Geno
In AHL playoffs Milwaukee won only two games against Iowa Chops but in ECHL Cincinnati won their third consecutive Kelly Cup in relatively easy way.
There were a whole bunch of award winners and runner-ups in our teams. To mention some, in ECHL our RD Roman Josi was the best defenseman in regular season and the best player in the playoffs. In NHL Jeremy Smith got chosen into the Rookie All-Star Team. Getzlaf won a couple of awards and Dustin Penner got Conn Smythe with Getzlaf as runner-up and Alexander Semin on the third place.
There were still at least two players in this year's team who played well whole season and were magnificent in the crucial games. First one was Karri Rämö, who stepped up and claimed the position of team's number one goalie. He was 39-22-5 in the regular season and his GAA was 3.45, SV% 0.887 and AvR 7.72. In playoffs he was 11-4-0, GAA 2.27, SV% 0.932 and AvR 8.73. In his four Stanley Cup final games Rämö's AvR was 10.
The second player whose actions deserved mentioning is Marcel Hossa. He seems to suite as well in offensive as in defensive lines. With his attributes it is impossible to believe how well he is capable to play. In playoffs he was tremendous. His AvR was the fourth best of the team after Penner, Rämö and Getzlaf. He played all playoff games and most of them in totally 'wrong' position, as checking line RW. He was third in scoring goals in playoffs in Preds by hitting 9 goals. But the most impressive stats was hits. He led the whole league's playoffs stats with 134 hits in 22 games. Runner-up Paul Gaustad from Penguins played 22 games too but he had 76 hits. 58 hits less than Hossa! I must say I just have to love this guy!
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This challenge is now over for my part. The two Stanley Cups we won were the first ones I've ever won so I think it all went well. Thank's to everyone and especially to the arrangers of these challenges!
