Eric Staal has been just one of the big stories of these playoffs. (Source: CP)

NHL rivalry schedule – Since the day the NHL announced the schedule for this season I’ve made my opinions known that I hate the new rivalry-based schedule. There are far too many great teams and elite players in this league for the NHL to restrict the fans’ experience of seeing  Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and teams like the Detroit Red Wings to once every three years.  The NHL’s thought process behind the schedule is that familiarity breeds contempt but when the Sens and Sabres hooked up in the second round there was little to no animosity built up between the teams. All told, the Ottawa Senators played 8 regular season games, and 5 playoff games against Buffalo. If you combine the Sens’ regular season and post-season games it works out to be 14 percent or 1 out of every 7 games played this year were against Buffalo. That’s absolutely ridiculous! You’d expect two teams to meet up so frequently in a league like the CFL not the NHL.  

Oil spill: The Edmonton Oilers are the undisputed feel good story of the playoffs because a) they’re an underdog that has surpassed expectations, b) they work hard and have a lot of character players, and c) they are the lone Canadian club left and by default have gotten slapped with the “Canada’s Team” moniker. Lost amongst the positives is an ugly truth. Edmonton is far and away the most penalized team in the playoffs and it’s mainly because they’re mixing in a healthy dose of the dreaded neutral zone trap. Just don’t tell coach Craig MacTavish that.

 "Absolutely not a trap. Edmonton will not ever employ anything called a trap. It might be a similar style, but it will never be called a trap.”

In my opinion it’s all semantics. The Oilers have regularly deployed one forechecker and line up four players across the neutral zone throughout the playoffs. The Oilers used this extensively against the Red Wings and used this heavily during the third period of games when they led the Sharks. Basically it adds up to be an extremely boring brand of hockey. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching the Oilers when they’re forechecking and excelling at the transition game. It’s just when they deploy the trap it’s about as exciting as watching LeBron’s supporting cast in Cleveland.

People aren’t dwelling on this fact because of all the redeeming qualities the Oilers have going for them but if the Oilers win the Stanley Cup relying heavily on the neutral zone trap it will be the worst possible scenario for the new NHL.  Despite Commissioner Betmman’s best attempts the level of officiating in the playoffs has dropped a notch from the regular season. Take Mike Peca’s game winning goal in Game 6 of the Sharks’ series as an example. Peca hooked Sharks’ defenseman Scott Hannan off the puck and skated in unopposed and scored what would turn out to be the series clinching goal. There’s not a chance in hell that goal would have been allowed if the playoffs were being officiated at the regular season standard.

Perhaps Ryan Smyth summarized the Oilers’ style of play best, “You got to find ways to win, and if that's what it takes, then so be it.”'

NHL, where are you? – As much as we complain about the announcing work of Bob Cole and Harry Neale or the fact that TSN’s “Maggie the Monkey” concept has taken on the feel of an SNL skit gone way too long there’s not much to complain about playoff coverage in Canada. This is especially true when you consider for example that according to an article in the LA Times 51% of cable TV households in the greater Los Angeles market don’t have access to OLN – the NHL’s main network carrier in the US.

As you can imagine with the reduced accessibility of OLN, the ratings for the playoffs are well down for the NHL in the U.S. The playoffs are drawing a 0.4 rating on OLN compared to 0.7 on ESPN during the 2004 playoffs, which translates to a drop from 580,000 households to only 246,000.

The LA Times article also reported that 42 of the 57 OLN regular-season telecasts got a 0.0 rating in L.A. How is that possible? It simply means that none of the sample Nielson households in LA watched those games; there was still an audience for those games albeit an extremely small one.

Olympic Omissions: With each game that the Carolina Hurricanes play, it further pronounces the error that Wayne Gretzky and the brain trust that selected the Olympic team made in not selecting Eric Staal. The 21-year old Staal who had a breakout 45-goal, 100-point regular season campaign currently sits atop the playoff scoring lead.  I can’t say enough about how impressive Staal has been in these playoffs.  He gives and takes hits, he crashes the net and he’s been clutch with several big goals.

In my opinion Staal’s defining playoff moment came in Game 2 of the New Jersey series when he scored a goal with 3 seconds left in the third period to send the game into OT which Carolina went on to win. What made the goal so remarkable other than there were three seconds left is that it came 18 seconds after the Devils scored on Carolina to put them up 2-1. What should have been a deflating goal for Carolina ended up being a source of inspiration for Staal to come up big and redeem the game for the team and netminder Cam Ward who looked dejected after giving up a late goal. It was a testament to Staal’s leadership that after the goal celebration he skated the length of the ice just to tap Ward on the pads to let him know that the team got the goal back for him.

If Staal’s playoff performance wasn’t enough, Sidney Crosby’s performance at the World Hockey Championships has given us all the proof we need that he should have been part of the Turin squad.  Crosby led the WHC in goals, points and had the second-best +/- in the tournament.

Anthem Debate: By booing the Canadian national anthem at the start of Game 5, San Jose Sharks’ fans set off a national outcry of indecency and ignorance. The root cause of the San Jose fans’ act was in fact a response to the booing of the American national anthem during Game 4 in Edmonton when audible boos were heard on San Jose TV apparently when the Oilers in-game staff flashed a picture of Joe Thornton at the beginning of the Star Spangled Banner.  There’s a simple way of avoiding misinterpreted situations such as this or political statements such as the one made by Montreal fans around the start of the Iraqi war; get rid of the national anthems before the start of a game. The place for national anthems is during international competitions. Also consider that the majority of players plying their trade in the U.S. are either Canadian or European and it makes the existence of the national anthems seem even less relevant.

Perhaps in the place of national anthems teams can adopt team anthems like they do in soccer. On paper this seems like a good idea but the more thought I put behind the idea the more fearful I am of entrusting song writing to individual clubs. You know the Bruins and Blackhawks would skimp on costs and plus I’m not sure how wise it is to allow clubs that play songs like Cotton Eyed Joe to be charged with selecting original music.