Hello, and welcome back to playoff hockey.

Folks, it’s been a minute. The last Half-Assed Playoff Previews I wrote in 2017 were some of my finest work, which basically perfectly predicted the dynamics at play of each series. In contrast, this playoff preview is going to double-down on the “half-assed” part of the title. Nevertheless, as this series is simply an irresistible tchotchke to rotate in my mind, I feel compelled to call this series purely in terms of balls and strikes. Check out WTYKY Voicemails if you want my feelings, I’m just doing science here.

5-on-5

In the red corner, here are the 5v5 results for YOUR Ottawa Senators this season:

Unless you are very new here, there should be little in this graph you find surprising. Chabot, Stützle, Tkachuk, and Zub are good. Zetterlund is good because he’s played a lot with Stützle, Giroux is kind of washed, Sanderson should be better except he’s spent a lot of time with Hamonic, etc. The main takeaway here is that Ottawa has very few weaknesses outside of their 3rd pairing, but HOOOOOOOO BOY what a weakness! It might be too early to make the Big Reveal about what I think is gonna happen in this series, but fuck it: if the Leafs find a way to regularly get their top 6 including Matthews, Marner, and Nylander in various permutations on the ice against a pairing with Tyler Kleven, Travis Hamonic, or both on it, the Sens are almost certainly cooked. Write it down, take a picture, send it to Coming In Hot, if the Sens lose, it’s gonna be because Hamonic and/or Kleven are implicated in several goals against. If Jensen is healthy enough to play and Matinpalo can float Kleven on the 3rd pairing, Ottawa might be able to put just enough duct tape over this massive hole in their 5v5 dry wall to see them into the next round, but I think the mismatch of Toronto’s top 6 vs. Ottawa’s bottom pair is going to be the main thing that decides the series, at least at 5v5.

Brady Tkachuk and Tim Stützle will do fine regardless of which matchup they get, and Ottawa’s 3rd line of Grieg-Pinto-Amadio will probably also do fine, which is why Toronto will be trying to find any other matchup they can possibly get for Matthews et. al.

Kauze 4 Konzern: what is Dylan Cozens doing over there so close to the “Bad” part of the graph? I don’t have any alarm bells going off when I watch him, but man, it sure would be nice if our 2nd line centre had better 5v5 results after a solid 20 games to find his legs with the Sens. Something to keep an eye on.

Meanwhile, in the blue corner:

I’m just here to call balls and strikes, so let’s call a strike right now: the Leafs are a very good top 6 forward cor(e/ps), one good 1st D-pairing, and a bunch of scrubs. Their big trade deadline acquisition of Scott Laughton stinks, their best young prospect, Nick Robertson, stinks, their toughest tough guy, Ryan Reaves, stinks, and their guy with an umlaut in his name David Kämpf also stinks. Tim Stützle is going to eat David Kämpf’s mittagessen in the Umlaut Name Battle. Even their Domi stinks. Fuck this team with extreme prejudice. No one outside of the guys I’ve heard of scares me even a little bit, and they shouldn’t scare you, or anyone on the Senators, either. The Sens are going to get 30 minutes each game where the Leafs have Frozen Dinner on the ice, and it will be up to them to make the most of that time. Dylan Cozens needs to find a way to go ham against “Bobby McMann”. Come on, buddy, I believe in you!

Special Teams

I’ll keep this brief: Toronto’s powerplay is very good, and Ottawa’s penalty killing is kind of shitty. I don’t think Ottawa’s going to be able to fix their entire PK in 36 hours, so my recommendation is that they simply take as few penalties as possible. Much like the Curious Case of Ottawa’s 3rd Defence Pairing, special teams represents another avenue through which the Sens hopes in the series might be killed off like Sean Bean in that movie or television show of your choice.

Goaltending

This one is genuinely interesting. In the red corner, while Linus Ullmark has certainly had his share of ups and downs, I think most Sens fans would describe his performance this season as quite satisfactory. Meanwhile in the blue corner, prior to my pre-playoffs investigation, I had assumed that Anthony Stolarz was a kind of Mid goaltender who was merely riding a hot streak. What I didn’t realize until recently was how hot that particular streak was. 75 GA per 100 xGA is a Hamburglar level of hotness. I don’t think that level of goaltending is sustainable, mostly because I don’t think Anthony Stolarz is comparable to Dominik Hasek in terms of goaltending ability, but is being as good as Linus Ullmark sustainable? It might be! It’s certainly sustainable for Linus Ullmark. Someone who is smarter about goaltending than me, someone with puck tracking data, or both, should investigate what’s going on with Anthony Stolarz because the possibility that Ottawa does not have the advantage in net in this series is a serious one. We’ll call this part of the matchup a toss-up, because I’m feeling optimistic, but if Toronto ends up with the best goalie in this series, I’ll be forced to conclude that it wasn’t really surprising.

Cool! It’s like nothing has changed in the past 20+ years!

Season Series

Throughout the regular season, Toronto has failed to convincingly outplay Ottawa except for when they trail and Ottawa does nothing but try to protect the lead. Also, Ottawa has only trailed Toronto for something like 7 minutes total in three games. I don’t think this proves that Ottawa has a significant advantage heading into the series, but it does make me feel better, and reduce the perceived likelihood that Toronto will dominate the series. In short: it will be up to Toronto to prove that the playoffs are different, because in the regular season Ottawa has handled the Leafs in a way that they could only dream of handling the powerhouses of Buffalo and Montreal.

X-Factor: Playoff Experience

Call it wish-casting, call it fan-fiction, call it a vision that was revealed to you in a dream, the fact of the matter is that while we all SAY that we KNOW that Brady, Timmy, Tommy, Sandy, and Ridly will be Playoff Gamers, we won’t know for certain until Sunday night. Will they be able to treat these games just like any other game even though they aren’t just any other game? Probably! But it could be a wild first 10 minutes. Hopefully the veterans like Giroux, Amadio, Jensen, and *makes gagging motion* Nick Cousins can help the younger guys calibrate the energy they need to bring. In the blue corner, Toronto has no shortage of playoff experience. All that experience is terrible, but they definitely have it. Take Auston Matthews, for instance. Auston Matthews already has 55 career playoff games under his belt, even though he’s only won a single playoff series since 2017. He’ll be the last guy on the ice who is going to act like he hasn’t been there before, because if there is one place he has been before, it is Round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

So, what do? This is a true double-edged sword for both teams. If Ottawa can meet with triumph and disaster, treat those two imposters as just the same, and plant the seed of doubt in the fertile soil of the famously fragile Maple Leaf psyche, they could ride the momentum to a quick series win. On the other hand, the longer the Leafs are allowed to stay comfortable, the better it is for them. That’s why this is a true X-factor.

My recommendation: use a post-hoc rationalization to show that the eventual series result was inevitable the whole time.

The Wisdom

I don’t think Toronto has a lot of ways to win this series, but I think that Ottawa has a lot of ways to lose it. Getting their bottom D-pairing stuck in matchup hell, sending Toronto to the PP too many times, and getting too high on their own emotional supply while playing undisciplined hockey, are the three massive rakes that they must avoid stepping on to get past this eminently beatable Maple Leafs team. Luckily these rakes are highly visible and avoidable. Let’s not get it twisted, this Leafs team is deeply unimpressive, maybe the least impressive Leafs team since 2017, and they never would have won the division if they hadn’t been floated to an inflated record by a combination unsustainably strong goaltending and lucky record in one goal games. Ottawa should feel blessed to get the opportunity to face them in the first round as a wild card team.

And speaking of goaltending, there is admittedly an outside chance that Stolarz simply continues to be hotter than the surface of Venus, and that the Leafs will win this series no matter what Ottawa does. But here is my retort: that’s life! If you don’t want to risk losing because the other team had a hot goalie, then playoff hockey might not be for you. Ultimately, Ottawa’s superior top-to-bottom depth, boundless energy, and renowned players who already play with a “playoff style” (read: are extremely fucking irritating at an almost-spiritual level), combined with Toronto’s biblical levels of swaggerlessness and mental strength which is about as resilient as a gingerbread space station, all point to one most likely outcome for this series:

Senators in 6