Step One to your Stanley Cup Playoffs guide

Figuring the Stanley Cup Playoffs is really quite easy, if you follow the steps.
 
Step One: The Cup is not going to either Anaheim or San Jose.
 
This is not a bold prediction, to be sure. The best teams are elsewhere – Nashville, Tampa, Boston, Winnipeg, maybe Pittsburgh on muscle memory – and the Ducks and Sharks are pretty likely to give in to temptation and wallop the dog out of the each over a long and debilitating series.
 
That kind of physical play over an extended series typically comes at a cost later – either through injuries, re-injuries or just plain fatigue. Deep runs usually feature early series breeze-bys, and neither of these two look very breezy.
 
Not only that, Anaheim probably needs to ride goalie John Gibson the entire way, which is always a difficult proposition for any team, and San Jose has played three seasons – one in which they couldn’t score, one in which they scored with ease, and a mini-season at the end in which they stopped scoring again.
 
In other words, you can’t make hide nor hair of either of them, which is a bad reason to bet them to run deep.
 
The Ducks have had their injury issues, most notably Ryan Kesler early and Cam Fowler (shoulder, will probably miss the series) late, but the Sharks are still waiting to see if Joe Thornton’s knee will be strong enough to support him if/when he returns. Thornton sensibly said he wouldn’t return unless the knee was sound, but his return would also cause the Sharks to play at an even slower pace than they have in the second half of the season. The team’s most obvious strengths – penalty killing and avoiding penalties themselves – will reveal themselves against such a penalty-prone team as Anaheim, but the Ducks are also an excellent penalty killing team and San Jose’s power play is uninspiring.
 
In sum, these are two teams that rely heavily on familiar veterans and familiar styles, familiar mostly to each other, and the other roster differences are slight enough that one gravitates immediately to the one serious imbalance between the two.
 
Gibson. If he is healthy (he was injured in a collision with Colorado’s Gabriel Landeskog 10 days ago), he gives the Ducks as close to a sure thing in an unsure series. If not, it’s probably best to sit back and wait for someone to get puck luck – knowing all the time that the best teams in the other half of the bracket will be hammering each other too – only at a much higher level.