Playoff Prediction

Who would have thought the Boston Bruins and the St. Louis Blues in the Stanley Cup final? As we learned from Don Cherry, the Blues have 20 Canadians on their playoff roster. Boston has five Canadians on their playoff roster. It would be hard for me not to cheer for St. Louis. The two coaches could not be more complete opposites. The Bruins coach, Bruce Cassidy, was a good junior player who was drafted in the top couple of rounds of the NHL draft. After many knee injuries, he got into coaching. His first NHL stint was in Washington were he lasted a couple of years. He returned to Junior in Kingston for a while before getting a job with Boston’s American league team. After years of being an assistant, he got his chance when the Bruins fired Claude Julian a couple years ago. Craig Berube was never drafted to the NHL but fought his way through the Minors to play close to a 1,000 games in the NHL. He got a short stint as coach of my Philadelphia Flyers. He also was in charge of St. Louis’s American league team before making the jump to be an assistant in the NHL. Mike Yeo was fired 20 games into this season when St.Louis was in last place. It will be great for either one of these gentleman to win the Cup. I was looking through some old
rosters when these two teams played in the Stanley Cup final in 1970; the names are full of great hockey memories. For St. Louis, it started with their coach Scotty Bowman and their captain Al Arbour who ended up having a great coaching career. There were the Plager brothers – Barclay, Bill and Bob. Then, Terry Crisp and Red Berenson, who coached Michigan for more than 30 years after stints in the NHL. Of course we can’t forget that Bobby Orr led the Bruins to the Cup. My prediction is St. Louis will win it in six. *My hockey job as chairman of the PJHL has included some changes in the last few weeks. Now, our 63 team league has hired its first commissioner. We had more than 60 applications for this job from across Ontario to pick from. We decided to go with Terry Whiteside. Terry is from Durham and has been involved in Junior C hockey as a player, coach, manager and executive for the last 40 years. As a bank manager for more than 30 years, Terry brings a good mix of business and hockey to lead our group for the next few years. *The Bulldogs tied North Middlesex 5-5 in Strathroy on Sunday afternoon. Wilson Shipp had two goals and Jordan Moulton added one to lead the local scoring.

Playoff Prediction was last modified: May 28th, 2019 by Tammy Schneider

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