With the playoffs only 2 days away now (yippee) the stars don’t know 2 things, who their playing, and who’s the final Dman Inserted into the line up. The final 2 names:Nils Lundvkist and Jani Hakanpaa are the last 2 names in the rotation, and while it’s pretty much confirmed hakanpaa is going to get the nod, I just thought I’d share a couple of the ice time graphics of the past 5 cups winners and how the kinda evenly distributed pairing minutes, and how the idea that playing Suter Tanev, Lindell, Harls, and Miro 20+ a night whilst playing Nils 8+hasn’t held true for teams in previous runs. Now I know this isn’t a one size fits all, but I’m shining some light as to why maybe DeBoer would rather play hakanpaa for the 12+ minutes rather than Nils, although I do think Nils deserves a crack as a QB3 3rd pairing dman, this maybe the best chance of the Benn Seguin era to win, so DeBoer going with a veteran who can hold his own physically and has playoff experience makes sense, but I hope he doesn’t Try to stick to his gun to hard and becomes too stubborn to make a change if needed. (Graphs are average TOI per game for defenseman of winning cup team via StatMuse).
