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How many times do we need to go through this? The Hockey News takes last year's standings, pencils everyone in the exact same spot, picks one team to "surprise" based on sexy off-season moves (this year = Carolina Hurricanes), picks one team to fall due to UFA losses (this year = New Jersey Devils) then moves everyone else up or down one or two spots and calls it done. No more thought than that.
If you truly believe the following will happen again, then yes, we'll be near the bottom of the conference:
- Coach firings, incompetent replacement triggering language debate and immediate losing streak
- Cammalleri/Bourque combining for a whopping 14 goals
- Gionta only puts up 8 goals while being hurt most of the year
- Markov misses 69 games
- We're forced to paly rookies + Weber a total of 203 games on defense
- We ice a 4th line of Darche-Enqvist-Blunden for quite a while
- Palushaj makes in into 38 games scoring a whole 1 goal
The real answer is this: We weren't a 15th place team last year, despite what the standings tell us. Wretched bad luck, self-created controversy, massive amounts of man games lost, patchwork defense, and we still scored 2 fewer goals than we allowed, once you get rid of shootouts and empty netters. That's a better record than Washington, the "elite" playoff team who THN picked to finish 1st in the conference.
Montreal will be far better next season than 2011-12. Deal with it.
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