It's the Best Day of the Year, Enjoy it (Or Else)
It's the first day of the rest of our lives. Are you ready for the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs?
Merry Christmas, hockey fans. Oh wait, it’s Easter? Whatever. Jesus is in the building and he’s come at a good time.
It’s the first day of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs. Today’s the day we’ve been waiting for since the Florida Panthers hoisted the Cup last June.
OK, the 2024 playoffs were, like, really, really long. Maybe we gave ourselves a week or so to recover. But we always, eventually, find ourselves crawling back to the feeling we have on this day, right?
Today makes me feel alive, and today proves every year – sometimes against the odds – that I will love hockey forever.
Today, anything’s possible. Today, 16 teams assemble to spend the next few weeks showing us some of the best – or at least some of the most exciting – hockey we’ll ever see. Best part? We don’t even know who it’ll be or what it’ll look like until it happens.
Will it be Joel Eriksson Ek and Kirill Kaprizov, fresh off injury, desperate to prove these Wild are really who we thought they might finally be?
Will Connor Hellebuyck shake the (debatably unfair) playoff choke artist allegations and put together a postseason that looks more like his regular seasons, or will he leave that up to the Toronto Maple Leafs? It can’t really be both, and that’s the beauty of the Stanley Cup Playoffs: Glory is rare, and it doesn’t come easy.
Will the Carolina Hurricanes prove that they never needed Mikko Rantanen, or will the Dallas Stars prove that he’s the one piece they needed to finally crack the code? Do the Colorado Avalanche even care about any of this?
Will the LA Kings solve the Edmonton Oilers for the first time in four tries, or will the greatest player in the world and his Hart Trophy frontrunner bestie reach another level we didn’t know existed?
In just a few hours, we’ll sit back and watch it all unfold once again. Thanks for taking another Stanley Cup Playoff journey with me.
Let’s have a blast and cherish this feeling of possibility before our dreams are crushed and the refs start blowing it.