Why The Stanley Cup Playoffs Are The Best Playoffs In All Of Sports - An Investigative Report
In my heart of hearts, I am a journalist (read: I spent a semester in school studying journalism). And as a journalist, I have a certain level of journalistic integrity I must uphold for you, the consumers of my journalism. So this doesn’t come from any place of bias or anything, this is just me doing my job as a journalist and preventing you the facts of what I’ve found in my extensive research process. And that is that if there was to be a battle royale of every sports’ playoffs and/or tournaments, the Stanley Cup Playoffs would beat the fucking piss out of everybody else. And starting on Wednesday night, April the 13th at 7pm regular people time, the Stanley Cup Playoffs come back into all of our lives. After all 30 teams wrapped up their 82-game schedules over the weekend, 16 more teams will battle it out for the best trophy in all of sports. And from Wednesday night until some point in the beginning of June whenever a captain first hoists Lord Stanley’s Cup over his head, we get to soak it all in and drink it down smooth.
There’s really nothing that can match the intensity of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. These guys all just played a grueling 82 game schedule and there’s a chance that they have to play another 28 to get the game’s most prized possession. It like ordering a pizza for delivery but it takes those idiots so long to get to your place that by the time they drop it off, you have to throw the pizza in the oven for an extra 3-4 minutes. Maybe not exactly the same but I’m assuming you get the metaphor. But now everything that has happened over the past 82 games means nothing. Zilch. Nada. The whole season gets boiled down to somewhere between 16-28 more games. So from the first puck drop in every game until that final whistle, it’s total chaos. It’s mayhem. It’s anarchy and it’s the strangest combination of both poetry on ice and blood sport. Every shift matters a little bit more. Every shot needs to be a little more accurate. Every hit needs to be finished just a little harder. Again, this is all without bias but ice hockey is the greatest sport on the planet. And somehow, some way, the Stanley Cup Playoffs manage to take the greatest sport and make it a little more great.
It’s just a completely different atmosphere for the rest of the playoffs in every other sport. In the NFL, teams don’t get a chance to really build a ton of bad blood in a series since they only play 1 game against each other. In the MLB, teams don’t really have a ton of chances to really take out that bad blood on one another in a physical manner. Sure, you can bean a guy with a ball. Sure, you can slide into 2nd so hard that you shatter a dude’s leg. But for the most part, that physical nature of the game isn’t there. The NBA Playoffs suck more dick than every movie that Adam Sandler has put out in the past 7 years. So through my investigation, here are the only few things that I’ve found to be more enjoyable than watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
1) Unexpected free food
2) Unexpected free sex (or so I would assume)
And that’s about it. Years and years of research have gone into this and those are the only two things that are better than watching 16 teams battle it out for the Stanley Cup. And with some of the match ups and story lines heading into this year’s playoffs, even those two things might fall by the wayside. You’ve got the Yzerman Cup 2.0 in the East with Tampa vs Detroit. You’ve got Dallas Stars playing against Minnesota, the state they abandoned 23 years ago. You’ve got the Hawks vs the Blues and Chicago vs St. Louis in anything always brings out the hate tenfold in BC and Chief. We’ll have a full preview of the Flyers vs Caps coming up tomorrow and then Pittsburgh vs the Rangers in a series in which Flyers fans have to decide who they hate less. All of that starts Wednesday night and life is better because of it.