Down Goes Brown's Weekend Review: Which Coaches Are Getting the Pink Slip?

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

(Editor's note: Sean McIndoe looks back at recent play in the NHL and the league's biggest storylines in his weekend review. You can follow him on Twitter.)

The final weekend of the regular season didn't bring quite as much drama as we'd have hoped for, with only one playoff race still left to be settled. But that race was a good one, with the Bruins, Flyers and Red Wings all heading into action with a chance at one of the East's two remaining spots.

Thanks to some scheduling karma, we got to sit back and watch it all play out on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, so did Tuukka Rask, who was a surprise scratch for the Bruins due to illness. That forced backup Jonas Gustavsson into action, and it went just about as well as you'd expect. Gustavsson was shelled, the Bruins dropped a 6-1 blowout to the Senators, and the Red Wings were in the playoffs despite losing to the Rangers. The streak lives, and the Wings will get a first-round rematch with the Lightning.

That loss left the Bruins on life support, and the Flyers pulled the plug a few hours later with a win over the depleted Penguins. That completes an impressive late-season run for a team that seemed all but out of the race in January. The Flyers will get the top-seeded Capitals in the opening round.

As for the Bruins, it's hard to see missing the playoffs as anything but a disaster for the franchise, especially after rookie GM Don Sweeney traded away four draft picks at the deadline for veteran reinforcements and is now likely to lose UFA Loui Eriksson for nothing. The bottom line is that the Bruins just aren't good enough, and changes of some kind are coming in Boston. We'll get to what seems like the most obvious of those a few sections down.

The other big news from the weekend were the two Western division titles up for grabs. The Stars grabbed the Central crown with a win over the Predators on Saturday; the Kings had a chance to do the same against the Jets, but blew a 3-0 lead and dropped a shootout decision to leave the door open for the Ducks. They strolled through it, beating the Capitals last night to win the division and set up a first-round matchup with the Predators. The Kings are stuck with a much tougher matchup with the Sharks, and have also squandered home ice in any second-round meeting with the Ducks. Hockey fans know better than to get ahead of ourselves, but that Kings loss to the Jets feels huge.

The full playoff bracket and schedule is now set, and can be found here.

The five teams with the best shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

5. Los Angeles Kings (48-28-6, +31 true goals differential)—Yes, still ahead of the Ducks, if only barely. Yes, I can see myself really regretting this about two weeks from now.

4. St. louis Blues (49-24-9, +22)—You always knew their path out of the West would go through Chicago. But in the first round? Ouch.

3. Pittsburgh Penguins (48-26-8, +42)—Call me crazy, but I feel like the Islanders didn't really want to play the Penguins in the first round.

2. Dallas Stars (50-23-9, +37)—They got it done when they needed to down the stretch, and will have home-ice advantage through the Western Conference side of the bracket.

1. Washington Capitals (56-18-8, +57)—We're all running out of ways to describe the Caps' regular-season dominance, but this is kind of an amazing stat.

This feels like a weird list this week. On the one hand, the Caps have to be No. 1—they just won the Presidents' Trophy by double-digit points, posting one of the best regular seasons of the cap era. They've got home ice through the playoffs. Their goalie is going to win the Vezina, and their best forward won the Rocket Richard. They're even rested and reasonably healthy. So sure, of course they're the league's top team heading into the postseason.

Then again, the fine print on this section has never said "top team." It says "best shot at winning the Stanley Cup." And the Washington Capitals don't feel like much of a favorite right now. The oddsmakers say they are, and that counts for something. But when you ask around, you don't find many people who are picking them to go all the way.

Some of that is just frontrunner fatigue—nobody wants to choose the first-place team to win it all, because you don't get any credit for picking the favorite. But there seems to be something else going on here, too. So this week, let's examine the question: Just how vulnerable are the Capitals?

Let's start where these sorts of things always seem to start these days, with the fancy stats. The Capitals have been a top ten possession team, but just barely, ranking tenth in Corsi (all fancy stats are 5v5 score-adjusted). That's not bad—they rank ahead of some pretty good teams like Chicago and Florida—but all nine teams ahead of them are also in the playoffs. The Caps also have a 101.1 PDO, ranking fourth overall. That's not so high that it sets off the "unsustainable" alarms, especially on a team with an elite goaltender, but it bears watching.

There's probably also some old-fashioned recency bias kicking in. At one point this year we were wondering if the Capitals could break the single-season wins record, but since the trade deadline they've transformed from unstoppable juggernaut to merely very good. They've won 11 of 21 since March 1, a stretch that's included losses to potential Metro opponents like the Penguins (twice), Rangers, Flyers and Islanders, not to mention other contenders like the Blues, Kings and Ducks. It's not like the Caps are being exposed down the homestretch—they've had improved possession over that time, but have suffered from a league-worst shooting percentage that's unlikely to continue. Still, it's hard to feel like the presumptive favorite when you keep coming up short on the scoreboard.

But maybe all that is overthinking it. Maybe the sudden bear market on the Caps has more to do with a road to the Cup that looks much tougher today than it did a few months ago. Part of the appeal of the Washington bandwagon was that the East's path to the final looked much easier than the West's. While teams like the Kings, Hawks, Ducks and Blues were busy beating each other up, the thinking went that the Caps would have a relatively easy path and arrive in June with at least a little bit still left in the tank.

But over the last month, a new Eastern powerhouse has emerged, and it's one the Capitals will presumably have to face in round two. The Pittsburgh Penguins are rolling over the league, and have elbowed the Caps out of the driver's seat in many minds. And remember, the Pens are crushing it without Evgeni Malkin, who should be back early in the postseason. Heading into the playoffs, the Penguins are suddenly everyone's trendy pick (which is a little odd given that we're still not sure they'll have their starting goalie back in time, but that's another story).

So no, the Capitals probably won't win the Cup, even if they're going in as the kind-of sort-of favorite. But that's true of the top team every year. There's a reason why the Presidents' Trophy winner has only gone on to win the Stanley Cup twice in the cap era, and that's because it's just really hard to win a championship in the era of parity. The Capitals may have done everything right this year in what turned out to be a dream season, but they're still more likely than not to fall short of the Cup—not because some fatal flaw will be exposed, but because that's just how today's NHL works.

The five teams with the best chance of landing the No. 1 overall pick.

5. Calgary Flames (35-40-7, -28)—It was nice to see Niklas Backstrom earn the win in Minnesota against his former team in what could be his last NHL appearance.

4. Columbus Blue Jackets (34-40-8, -35)—In Boone Jenner and Brandon Saad, the Jackets had two 30-goal scorers for the first time in franchise history.

3. Vancouver Canucks (31-38-13, -53)—Alexandre Burrows ends a rough season by breaking out the Luc Bourdon tribute.

2. Edmonton Oilers (31-43-8, -43)—It's the question every hot stove fan has been asking all week: Taylor Hall for P.K. Subban—who says no?

1. Toronto Maple Leafs (29-42-11, -48)—Lost in the shadows of the Leafs' (intentionally) awful season: their AHL team has been excellent, going 51-15-6 and enter the playoffs as the league's top seed.

There's not all that much to argue about here; if we're basing the rankings on a team's chances at the top pick, then the draft lottery odds are locked in. The Maple Leafs aren't actually winning, of course—every diehard Toronto fan has known all season long that they'd finish dead last and still end up picking fourth—but we'll keep them in the top spot, anyway.

So instead, let's turn our attention to what tends to be a popular topic among the league's bottom-feeders as the regular season comes to a close: Who's getting fired? It's not a fun topic, but it's life in the NHL. When you don't win, your seat gets warm, and eventually that ends with a pink slip and best wishes in your future endeavors.

But this year, we may not see as much action in the unemployment line as we're used to. Most of the league's worst teams have already made recent coaching changes last summer, and some paid heavily to do so. The Maple Leafs, Oilers and Sabres aren't making any changes. Neither are the Blue Jackets, who pulled that trigger during the season. Other potential targets have already been given a vote of confidence; we've already been told that Vancouver isn't making a change, and apparently Michel Therrien is somehow going to survive a disastrous season in Montreal.

Other coaches don't look quite as safe. The Senators announced Sunday that Pierre Dorion will take over from Bryan Murray as GM. The expectation for weeks has been that Dave Cameron would be fired, leaving the team looking for its seventh coach in nine years, but there's at least a chance that Dorion might prefer to save that card for down the road. Paul Maurice could be in trouble in Winnipeg, as could Bob Hartley in Calgary. And there are reports of changes coming in Arizona today. But it won't be coach Dave Tippett being shown the door; instead, GM Don Maloney is apparently the one on the way out, with Tippett getting an increased role in front office decisions.

That leaves a couple of interesting calls. Patrick Roy is coming off another disappointing year in Colorado, one in which he took aim at his core players and failed (again) to improve the team's laughably bad possession numbers. Under ordinary circumstances, his seat would be red hot. But Colorado's Hall of Fame front office isn't ordinary circumstances, and Joe Sakic has already said that Roy is safe. Bigger picture, you wonder if Sakic would—or could—ever consider firing a local legend and longtime pal.

Then there's perhaps the most intriguing name of them all: Boston's Claude Julien. He was rumored to be on the way out last year, and it's been widely assumed that another playoff miss would spell the end of him. As one of the most respected coaches in the game, he'd have plenty of offers if he became available—perhaps even from a team that wouldn't have otherwise considered a coaching change. Still, sometimes a team decides it just needs to make a change. As for who the Bruins would bring in as a replacement… nah, they couldn't.

In any case, Julien seems like a good bet to become the biggest name available on the market. (Well, at least until next month, when we see how Ken Hitchcock and Bruce Boudreau's playoff runs have gone.)

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Congratulations to the Buffalo Sabres for earning the first overall pick in this year's draft in an alternate universe in which the NHL has implemented the Gold Plan. (That's the way-too-much-fun method of determining draft order based on points after elimination, one that would see fans cheering for wins instead of losses and that even the captains of bad teams are now endorsing.) The race came down to the final moments of the final game, as the Sabres needed an overtime win on Saturday night to just barely hold off a furious late-season charge from the Jets and Flames.

*The date that the team began accruing points, i.e. the day after they were mathematically eliminated (as calculated by Sports Club Stats).

• Easily the biggest off-ice news of the weekend: Pavel Datsyuk has confirmed that he plans to leave the NHL after this year. That's going to leave the Red Wings with a major hole in their lineup and a $7.5 million cap hit on the books. That second problem should be easy enough to solve (get ready for the "Pavel Datsyuk is technically a Coyote" era). The first one, not so much.

• The flood of big names hit by late-season injuries claimed a new victim on Saturday, and it's yet another Lightning player. Star forward Tyler Johnson was hurt on this late hit by Montreal's Greg Pateryn. No word yet on how long he'll be out.

• Another injured star: Eric Staal of the Rangers, who left Saturday's game after getting tangled up on this play. Early word is that he'll be OK for the playoffs.

• One more to watch: Penguins goalie Matt Murray, who left on Saturday with an apparent head injury after getting his helmet knocked off. We still don't know Marc-Andre Fleury's status, so this could be huge for a team that's viewed as a Cup favorite.

• Two big individual milestones for the Capitals on Saturday: Alexander Ovechkin's hat trick gave him his seventh 50-goal season, while Braden Holtby tied Martin Brodeur's single-season wins record. Neither player saw action in Sunday's season finale.

• Congratulations to North Dakota for capturing its eighth national title with a 5-1 win over top-seeded Quinnipiac.

• We've got a crazy story coming out of Russia in the days leading up to the Under-18 World Championships, where the country has fired the team's coach and replaced the entire roster as the result of a doping scandal. This could have an impact on the NHL draft, as top draft-eligible Russian prospects won't get a chance to perform for scouts and will head into the summer under a cloud of controversy.

• A nice moment in New Jersey, where Patrik Elias scored in the dying seconds of what could be his last game.

• An interesting end to the season for Vancouver's Derek Dorsett, who was ejected for engaging in water bottle-related tomfoolery. He ended up leading the league in penalty minutes with 177, making this the first time in the 80-plus game schedule era that nobody in the league reached at least 200 PIMs.

• Your feel-good story of the week: After 25 years as the emergency backup, an ECHL goalie finally makes his first pro start.

• Blackhawks rookie Artemi Panarin ended up hitting all of his performance bonuses, earning himself an extra $2.5 million for the season. That money goes onto Chicago's cap hit for next year, potentially complicating an already tricky offseason for Stan Bowman.

• Finally, let's send some good thoughts out to legendary head coach Jacques Demers, who's fighting back after suffering a stroke last week. History's only back-to-back winner of the Jack Adams and the last coach to win a Stanley Cup in Montreal, Demers earned a well-deserved reputation for not backing down from a challenge. Get well, coach.