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 Adam
Messages: 6877
Registered: August 2005
Location: Edmonton, AB
6 Cups
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| CrusaderPi wrote on Wed, 20 April 2022 12:53 |
| Mike wrote on Wed, 20 April 2022 12:49 |
| CrusaderPi wrote on Wed, 20 April 2022 14:37 |
Why do you hate the North Stars? They were fine, lovable losers even.
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1991?
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That didn't hurt. The team wasn't very good in '91. It was running on fumes and reputation alone. Without looking, I think that team was .500 in the regular season and .500 in the post season despite getting to the third round. I am sad we were denied the Gretzky - Lemieux finals, but that isn't Minnesota's fault.
The North Starts are also the spiritual successor for bother the Seals and Barons. Full points for that.
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We still were all the way to the conference finals. it was the last hurrah here for the Glory Days crew - the last Oilers hockey we'd see from Messier, Anderson and Fuhr. I think the fact we were back there again the next year with the leftover crew and Nicholls & Damphousse suggests we were in fact pretty good still with a strong enough supporting cast (Tikkanen, Simpson, Ranford, Smith, etc.) to compete.
Stupid underdog North Stars are probably the worst finalists of all-time. The team was 27–39–14 and I believe the only team with a losing record in the regular season to ever make the Stanley Cup Finals. The Oilers would have been in tough against a very good Penguins team, but you'd like to think we'd have done a little better. I mean, how many of those guys were on the Kings squad in 1993 and the Rangers in 1994 - Huddy on the Kings (with Kurri & Gretzky - and hilariously Jimmy Carson, swapped to LA for Paul Coffey who had more points than Carson at the time of the deal). Lowe, Tikkanen, Messier, Anderson, Beukeboum, Graves, MacTavish on the Rangers...I think they still had a shot.
If I recall though, Messier was hurt by the third round and hampered badly, and maybe Karma was catching up to us from all the dumb things Pocklington had been doing. Trading Kurri for additional help instead of letting him go to Italy might have been a better decision in retrospect too. Too many burned bridges.
"Thinking that a bad team's best players are the reason the team is bad is the "Tambellini re-signing Lennart Petrell" of sports opinions." @Woodguy55
#FireLowe #FireBobbyNicks #FireKenHolland #FireKeithGretzky
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