Bababooey
3 TPE


The only ways to shutdown a team with formidable depth is to either lean on your top players significantly and hope your depth wins on the aggregate, or have every line minorly outperform their lines with strong team defense. It's tough, but for New England the answer probably has to be in trying to win the way they've won up to this point in the playoffs: have their top players be their top players. Have faith in Lacksamus to continue his MVP style post-season and rely on the following lines and d-pair to keep LA at bay. It's not perfect, but trying to feed everyone after having your trip to the finals defined by Lacksamus' play ain't the answer.

1 TPE, 125 words


Cmon, we all know how this goes for the wolves. Wolves in packs, yeah they know how to fight and all that. They hunt together, survive, forage, whatever wolves do. But panthers? The giant ass, really fast cats? I don't even think the wolves come close to TOUCHING the panthers. Animals would be hurt in this prompt being answered, but only wolves. It'd be the lightest work ever for the panthers man. They could probably kill rhinos and giraffes, wolves aren't gonna be a problem.

1 TPE, 80? words



Call me a hater but, something tells me that this was the end for Edmonton. The whole "sell off the entire team for picks following an early playoff loss" really sets the tone tha they aren't going to try and be real competitive in the future. Winnipeg already accepted they aren't going to be winning anytime soon as soon as they traded for Ben Jammin, and they do have a pretty notable amount of their team in regression. They've been fairly consistent on re-tooling and bringing in effective talent though, so it wouldn't be the most surprising thing in the world to see Winnipeg make the playoffs consistently through and come back strong after a short "contention" hiatus.

I can't imagine New England is all that close to falling off. Meat of their core is still looking fairly hot, like, their oldest player is S63 (I aint counting goalies here) and they got some pretty nice S74 prospects coming up in the near future. Feels like the same situation with Philly. The meat of their team is still able to stick around, and barring any surprise trades/FA losses, it's hard to imagine the fall off is coming for them any time soon. Unlike the old guard in the west, these teams are still in their prime and not actively selling off pieces.

When it comes to who makes the finals, it feels like Philly and New England can keep their stranglehold out east. Maybe LA or Texas are the rearing of the new guard. I always have faith in Texas to do good things, and LA has the (probable) reigning MVP so it's tough to bet against them. As someone who wants something new, I'm going to put faith in Minnesota buying from Edmonton paying off and they make the finals within the next 3 seasons.

3 TPE, 300 words or something I forget