This Week In The NHL Bubble: Khudobin leads the Stars, Brayden Point the Difference Maker
“This Week In The NHL Bubble” is a weekly post dedicated to highlighting the week’s most interesting stories, stats, highlights, and much more.
We Are Not Going Home
Anton Khudobin was provided with the Stars player of the game award in their massive game 5 and series clinching win against the Vegas Golden Knights. Khudobin, while accepting the award from teammate Andrej Sekera, yelled at his teammates “We are not going home!.” The whole video is worth checking out below:
Khudobin and his 0.950 sv% is a big reason that the Stars were able to pull off the upset and eliminate the Vegas Golden Knights, but not the only one. Dallas put up a 47% CF% and 48.7 xGF% throughout the series. Against any other team that would be viewed negatively, but against the juggernaut that was the Vegas Golden Knights, that total is impressive and indicates they were in every game.
Dallas being in the cup final will provide Ducks fans a rooting interest, with the Stars having both Corey Perry and Andrew Cogliano.
Will the Ducks Make a Trade?
It appears like the Ducks should be making a move or two when you look at the current roster construction, so to me, it seems like a when not if for the Ducks making a decent size trade this offseason. The trade market is starting to heat up, with various teams now getting involved, including Buffalo and Minnesota making the Staal for Johansson deal yesterday, and other decently high profile names being mentioned in trade rumors, like Matt Dumba and Oliver Ekman-Larsson in Elliotte Friedman’s 31 thoughts. The Ducks should get involved sooner rather than later, to take advantage of GMs that might be a bit trigger happy after a playoff loss.
Brayden Point is the Difference Maker for Tampa
Tampa Bay eliminated the New York Islanders last night to advance to the Stanley Cup final, in what was a hard-fought series with multiple overtime games. The common denominator for Tampa Bay in their wins is that they had Brayden Point in the lineup, while they didn’t win a game without him in the lineup. Point has solidified his position as one of the top players on Tampa throughout this playoff run. In this series, the Lightning controlled 63% of the xGF along with 3 goals, 3 primary assists, and 1 secondary assist for 7 points.
It appears as if Steven Stamkos will be available for the Stanley Cup final at some point, so the rich will get richer soon. My heart says to go with Dallas for Perry, but Tampa is in beast mode right now and it will be hard to pick against them.
Game 1 will be Saturday at 4:30 PM PT on NBC.