John Forslund

Yeah, a little bit surprised.

You know, I think, you know, not astonished though, not blown away because, you know, if you watch the game as you guys do, you watch the league closely all year, this team's been building.

You know, they've been working through the obvious things that appear to all of us, which is their skill, right?

So you see that and you know they're young and they have this unbridled skill and they have a terrific power play and

And they got a goalie who really took off in the second half and he's had a brilliant playoff.

Okay.

But being around the Canadians like on Monday nights for Amazon and listening to Marty all season, he's talked about a defensive process, which is not easy for his team to grasp, not easy for them to be confident that they can play in low scoring games that would lead them to playoff success.

And by and large, some of these games, in the Buffalo series especially, have been off the rails.

So it looked like we're playing 80s-style hockey there for a while.

But they can play a tight game.

And this is the test.

You know, this is Carolina, the possession team, the analytics dream team, the team that possesses the puck better than every team in the league, a team that, you know, will try and forecheck you, you know, right into the ice and dominate play and make it hard to come up the ice.

The Canadians...

did that against them.

They broke the puck out efficiently.

They controlled the neutral zone.

They had so much room on transition to make plays and gain the zone and get real quality against Carolina.

It doesn't happen.

It just doesn't happen against Carolina.

against Brenda Moore and his system.