The Importance Of The Stanley Cup

It’s no mystery why the Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy in all of professional sports to win. That is taking nothing away from any of the other major sports, but to combine 82 regular season games in roughly 182 days plus practices and add on potentially another 28 in the playoffs, given the speed and pure physicality of the sport, is purely amazing. It often leaves us wondering how some of these players even get out of bed in June when all is said and done.

Even the best conditioned teams are going to have to deal with the inevitable bumps and bruises, not to mention outright physical and mental exhaustion, when you get into the final month of the rigorous and sometimes - depending on travel - brutal schedule. When you have a team of mostly younger players, who might not be used to its powerful effects, that could make things even more challenging.

With the importance of getting the inaugural season off to a good start, the Islanders had crammed 10 of their first 15 regular-season games at home in order to get things off on the right foot. What that created was a late-season stretch of not only games on the road, but a brutal trip out through Canada. And having just completed a stretch where they played 12 of 14 away from Barclays Center, the Islanders were looking for the comforts of home to get them back on the right track. The results were not immediate, as the team lost 4-1 to the Philadelphia Flyers on Monday before grabbing a crucial victory over the Ottawa Senators last night,