This NHL postseason has become a free-for-all, just as Blues general manager Doug Armstrong suspected it might.
"I think if you get in, you have a chance to win," Armstrong noted before the Blues opened their first-round series against the Winnipeg Jets.
Not much separates the 16 teams in the bracket. Higher seeding and the home-ice advantage hasn't meant much during this postseason.
The Blues won their first two games at Winnipeg, then the Jets flew to St. Louis and took two games at Enterprise Center.
The Tampa Bay Lightning looked to be the one sure thing entering these playoffs, since they earned 128 points during the regular season and won the Presidents' Trophy. "I quite honestly remove Tampa from that parity this year," Armstrong said. "They were head and shoulders above of everybody else."
Or at least they were. The Columbus Blue Jackets swept them out of the postseason, capped by their 7-3 victory Tuesday night.
After winning 62 games in the regular season, the Lightning won zero games in the postseason. That's the NHL for you.
"You have a historic regular season doing what we did and have basically a historic playoff in defeat," Lightning coach Jon Cooper said during his postgame news conference. "Six days in April, Columbus played better."
The upstart New York Islanders swept the Pittsburgh Penguins, the perennial Stanley Cup contenders led by Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. "They deserve it," Malkin said after the Islanders closed out the Penguins with a 3-1 victory Tuesday night. "They have a great team."
Elsewhere, the Dallas Stars won a game at Nashville and the Predators returned the favor by winning Game 3 in the Big D. The Colorado Avalanche won once at Calgary while taking a 2-1 series lead over the Flames, the Western Conference's top seed.
Similarly, the Vegas Golden Knights won once at San Jose while racing to a 3-1 series lead over the Sharks. The Toronto Maple Leafs won their opener at Boston and went on to build a 2-1 series lead over the higher-seeded Bruins.
"When they say the playoffs are a new season, you have to respect that," venerable Bruins captain Zdeno Chara told reporters. "Everything that you've accomplished during the regular season has been wiped off the table. Everybody starts with a zero. All the stats start with zero. I think that's one thing people like to talk about, having always one team being the favorite, the other team being the underdog, but there is no such a thing.
"You can be talking about teams that have this skill, that type of player, but if you do that you only bring motivation for the other team to do their best and bring their best and they usually do."
In hockey, more so than in basketball, concerted effort by one team can negate the skill advantage of another. Hence the potential for upsets.
"In the series, there are matchups," Maple Leafs coach Mike Babcock said. "You're going to play the majority of your shifts against a certain matchup, a certain set of D. You've got to out-will them. That's just it. Skill is a wonderful thing; will is more important at this time of year and determination."
These playoff teams all have the potential to take a team run. But only some of them figure out how to realize that potential. Once they do, they have a chance to become special.
"Once you've had success at playoff time, and you've disarmed the bomb or found the key to the safe and you figure out what happened, you just think you know how to make it happen," Babcock said. "Until you find that, though, you're in the same process as everybody else."
The old-time NHL had dynasties, most notably the Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens during the "Original Six" days. The Islanders, then the Edmonton Oilers ruled the 1980s.
Hockey's wealth has been more evenly distributed the last three decades, particularly during the modern salary cap era. During the last 19 seasons, 12 franchises have won the Cup and another 10 different franchises have played for it.
The Penguins are the only team to repeat as champions during that 20-year stretch, although the Chicago Blackhawks (three Cups in five years) and Los Angeles Kings (two in three years) enjoyed mini-dynasties.
On the other hand, the Carolina Hurricanes won a Cup. So did the Lightning, long before it built this offensive juggernaut. The Sharks, Predators and Golden Knights played for the Cup the previous three seasons.
Neither the Blues nor Jets (nor their predecessors, the Atlanta Thrashers) have played for the Cup during that span. But Winnipeg reached the Western Conference Finals last season and the Blues got to the Final Four in 2016.
Any franchise can rise up and have success. Earn a berth in the playoffs and anything goes.
Which team is favored to claim the sacred chalice this season? Based on what we've seen across the first-round series, that is anybody's guess.
