Yes, I’m going to do the easy thing and pick the Game 7 hero from last round. But Maroon isn’t the choice here just because he scored the double-overtime winner.
Look, the game has changed considerably and long gone are the days when you could freely use a roster spot on a five-minute face puncher to police the ice and not be worse off for it. Teams like the Los Angeles Kings, who didn’t adapt quick enough and got left behind speedier competition, have to change their way of doing things to have success again.
But playoff hockey is a different animal that demands certain aspects regular season action doesn’t. “Heavy hockey” is still a worthy piece of a playoff roster, but the connotations of it need to be updated. You need two teams to win it all: one for the regular season and one for the post-season. To deny that is to completely ignore what we’ve seen this playoff season.
The most important thing you need is skill at the top of the lineup. The leading scorers in these playoffs aren’t the low-lineup grit guys — it’s Nathan MacKinnon, Logan Couture and Brad Marchand. But Maroon and San Jose’s Barclay Goodrow are among two of the eight skaters with two game-winning goals this post-season. The further along we go, the more referees will put whistles in their pockets. Whether or not you agree that’s right is irrelevant — it’s the reality of the playoffs.
Maroon is coming off the best moment of his career, scoring the series-winning goal in front of his hometown and his son Anthony. With a one-year contract, he’s still proving that he deserves more term and money from someone this summer, so we’d expect the high of Round 2 to carry over to the conference final.