Quick Shifts: How youth is dominating Round 1 of Stanley Cup Playoffs

A quick mix of the things we gleaned from the week of hockey, serious and less so, and rolling four lines deep. Puck don’t lie.

1. The youngest team in hockey, the Montreal Canadiens (average age: 26.2), is giving the veteran Tampa Bay Lightning (30.0) all it can handle in their banger of a first-round series.

The fourth-oldest squad, Pittsburgh (30.2), is getting outrun something fierce by Philadelphia (27.7), its much younger intrastate rival.

The high-octane Ducks (27.7) are speeding and shooting their way ahead of the two-time finalist Oilers (29.7).

The Stars (28.7) have an edge over the Wild (29.2), as do the Mammoth (28.9) over the Golden Knights (29.5).

In seven of the eight playoff series, the younger roster is setting the pace.

The only exception being the Hurricanes’ (29.4) seemingly quick handing of the Senators (28.9). But the play-fast Canes, taking a cue from their buff 55-year-old head coach, look and act young.

Moreover, five of the NHL’s seven youngest rosters made the postseason, as did nine of the 14 youngest.

Experience matters, to be sure.

But increasingly, hockey is becoming a young man’s sport, conducted at breakneck speed.

This feels like bad news for organizations still depending on multiple stars who are in their late 20s or early 30s.

Blink, and your window will slam shut.

2. One of the greatest contributions Shane Doan — now interviewing with the Vancouver Canucks — has made to the Maple Leafs is bridging the gap between certain players and management.

Doan’s relationship with still-developing power forward Matthew Knies goes back to childhood; Knies and Doan’s son, Sabres stud Josh, remain tight to this day.

Less known is the role Doan has played with Nick Robertson.

Robertson, 24, tries to study the Bible almost daily, and Doan has long been a man of faith.

“Doaner’s a big follower as well,” Robertson said. “My chaplain talked to him a bit, kind of coordinating between me and him about our faith and stuff. So with Doaner, I talked a lot about it and how to find ways to maybe bring it in the locker room here with maybe a Bible study or something. But it’s hard because I’m a younger guy.”

Robertson’s relationship with God grew in the 2023-24 season, and it has brought him more peace in his career. The young forward was unaware that Doan, too, was a devout Christian. He found out organically through conversations with the executive.

“He’s kinda like the best of both worlds of what I want as a person, just having a successful career. Obviously, he’s played many games and been successful, but also being a follower of Christ away from the rink and how to take that into the game,” Robertson explained. “I asked a lot of questions, talked a lot with him about that (balance), and he will text me a verse here and there.

“He’s a great role model for me.”

Pro team culture, by its nature, can be a slippery slope for vice.

In his playing days, Doan built a remarkable reputation for going out and hanging with the boys, but also not putting partying ahead of his beliefs.

“That’s something you think about in this lifestyle,” Robertson said. “Like I said, he’s exactly who I want to be. I want to be a guy who plays a lot of games, is a leader, is counted on by his teammates and is a good person — but also follows what he believes in. I’ll ask him about the littlest things, and he helps me have a lot.”

3. Took a few years, but the NHL has been nailing it with staggered starts in Round 1.

I’m sure the intermission shows are great, but having the option of flipping from game to game and catching the finale of each one sucks the viewer into the whole tournament.

Back in my day, we’d have to hope an overzealous fan broke the glass to stagger the intermissions for us.

It’s not enough for the Hurricanes to run the Senators out of the first round. They had to run them off the Internet, too.

5. Digging into the philosophy and history of Maple Leafs front office candidate and outside-the-box thinker Mike Gillis, I found a few interesting notes I made listening to the former Canucks GM speak at a hockey conference a few years back. 

Gillis shed light on one of his more unique (and oft-panned) decisions: anointing Roberto Luongo the NHL’s first goaltender captain in 60 years.

Gillis and his staff would first identify a problem and then work toward a solution, caring little if the answer fit into NHL norms.

When Markus Naslund left in 2008, Vancouver was starved for leadership. No one was stepping up.

“There are no born leaders,” said Gillis, dismantling a cliché. “Leaders are developed.”

Head coach Alain Vigneault pitched their all-star goaltender for the C to both fill a void but, more importantly, to challenge Luongo.

Gillis’s staff balked at the idea but eventually decided the pros would outweigh the cons and saddled the goalie with the captaincy for two successful seasons.

“We made Roberto Luongo the captain to try and get him in a leadership position because he was so reluctant to do that,” Gillis said. 

“We got crushed in the media for it. But our purpose wasn’t to make a goalie a captain. It was to get better leadership out of that particular player. It actually worked. He became a better leader and a better player.”

If offered a mulligan, would Gillis do it again?

“You know, we got benefit out of it. I didn’t like all the scrutiny and difficulty that it caused in hindsight. I’m not sure. I would think about it a lot longer and a lot harder, knowing what I know now. But we didn’t know then that we’d get a reaction like that. We were just trying to help our team get better and help our goalie,” Gillis said.

“He reacted quite well. I think he grew as a player, as a person. He realized that you just can’t be the goalie. It’s a team. And when you have these responsibilities, you have to do certain things. He was great. It wasn’t a problem between him and the organization. It was certain people in the media making a big deal of it.”

Though he wouldn’t wear a letter in Florida, late-career Luongo conducted himself like an unofficial captain of the Panthers, acting as a voice for the room and garnering the utmost respect of his mask-less teammates.

6. Luongo was also the catalyst for a hormonal study Gillis had begun on the Canucks prior to his ouster in 2014.

“That was born out of Roberto, who suffered from a degree of performance anxiety. We were always trying to find a way to get him over that hurdle,” Gillis said. 

“He’d go through almost a physical change. And you would see it when he was answering questions with the media, when he was preparing for a game. He’s a really sensitive guy with a great sense of humour, and his sense of humour would go away and his sensitivity would increase.”

Gillis had read about research conducted on an English rugby team that gave blood at various points in the day, so the club could monitor players’ cortisone levels. Some players’ cortisone levels were relatively steady before, after and during games. Others spiked wildly 20 minutes prior to game time. (The U.S. military looked into a saliva test for this, so it can protect anxious soldiers from high-stress situations.)

The Gillis regime was trying to allow certain Canucks to recognize a hormonal spike was occurring, so they could address it. The initiative had only scratched the surface of a solution.

“We were just getting there when we all got fired,” Gillis lamented.

7. Gillis’s reputation is one of confidence, that he has plenty of this figured out already.

Yet the executive is not immune to regret. Gillis’s comments on his (mis)handling of the white-hot media market in Vancouver falls into that bucket.

“It was difficult for me to be part of what we thought was a great organization of players that contributed in the community, really great coaches that communicated well with the media, bent over backwards to give media accessibility to everybody, and still we’d be openly criticized by the same people over and over,” Gillis reflected. 

“You know, I should have just ignored it, for sure. But sometimes I didn’t. And I wouldn’t do that (again). That’s a mistake, and I shouldn’t have done that.”

If Gillis does land in Toronto — or anywhere for that matter — perhaps he’ll take analysts’ criticisms more in stride.

8. Speaking of managing life under the microscope, Paul Maurice revealed one of his strategies during his last stop in Toronto.

“There are far more challenges in either a large market or a Canadian market,” the former Maple Leafs and Jets coach conceded. “There just are. You have to be aware of how that gets into your room.”

Maurice said that he purposely never changed forward lines in practice when he coached the Leafs in 2006-07 and 2007-08.

“Especially if we had two or three days off. Because if I changed a line, I got 30 cameras in that guy’s stall, the guy who came off the second line to the third line. It might be that you just wanted to switch something, but that becomes a story that you build. So, I’d always do it in-game,” Maurice said. “Sometimes in these markets it’s like a drive-by shooting every day. 

“I’m sorry to offend somebody if there was one somewhere. But you gotta get used to that and then you can (have success).”

“That honestly might have been my first slap shot all year.” —Montreal Canadiens defenceman Lane Hutson on his blistering Game 3 overtime winner

10. The wildest thing of the many wild things Canucks president Jim Rutherford said at his season ender was that he signed Brock Boeser, Conor Garland, and Thatcher Demko to the richest contracts of their lives in part to keep their buddy Quinn Hughes happy.

So that’s why obvious trade candidate Boeser wasn’t moved at the 2025 deadline and re-upped in the 11th hour of free agency. So that’s why, with Hughes long gone, Garland got traded to Columbus before his extension even kicked in. So that’s why injury-prone Demko’s cap hit is jolting from $5 million to $8.5 million next season, even though he hasn’t been available for more than 23 games since 2023-24.

We’d probably be naïve to think the Canucks are the only club that makes keep-the-star-happy signings.

Perhaps this is a leap, but the four-year extension for Max Domi, Auston Matthews’s good friend, that Brad Treliving signed in 2024 crossed our mind when we heard Rutherford speak.

Domi never had so much security and is locked up till 2028, as long as Matthews.

11. Appreciate Connor Hellebuyck’s honesty on the state of the Winnipeg Jets. Looking back, their best chance to win it all may have been in 2018.

The Jets’ excellent and affordable core is aging out. At an average age of 30.8, Winnipeg’s roster is the second-oldest in the league.

The idea of trading the first star of the gold medal game sometime before his contract expires in 2030 is real.

If I’m Kevin Cheveldayoff, I’m trying to build a better defence around the 2025 Hart champ and delaying anything drastic until at least 2027.

Hellebuyck has a full no-movement clause this upcoming season, but that degrades to a 10-team yes-trade list in 2027-28.

Imagine the 10-team bidding war Winnipeg could create for such an affordable ($8.5 million cap hit) workhorse goalie.

12. That first Rick Bowness training camp in Ohio is going to be a tiny slice of hell.