Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

No one is ever going to be totally happy with the ways in which the NHL's referees or officials make their decisions. We can all agree on that.

If there's a game in which neither team is whistled for a penalty, both will likely complain that the refs missed calls on the other. If there's a game in which both teams receive 10 power plays, both will complain that the referees were overly harsh in doling out discipline. No one is ever especially happy with calls that go in between those two extremes, either, because unless you win, you aren't happy. And sometimes, even when you do win, you aren't happy.

It's tough to know what, exactly, brought all this to a head in these playoffs. Alex Ovechkin complaining about a league-wide conspiracy in Game 6 after the end of Game 7; Jonathan Toews stamping his feet when his team got clobbered on home ice by its archrival; Sidney Crosby saying the league needs to institute video review for puck-over-the-glass calls; Jonathan Quick abusing officials because the Kings gave the Sharks a two-man advantage in overtime.

Doesn't it strike anyone as being a bit much?

No one likes to lose in October, let alone in the second round of the playoffs, and you might even say that the refs have made a bit of a spectacle of themselves in the last few games. The best thing a ref can do, the old saying goes, is not be noticeable, and things have admittedly gotten a bit out of hand in some instances.

But nonetheless, can you imagine the eye-rolling or outright mockery in Chicago if Henrik Zetterberg had said the same things Toews did after they got creamed in Game 1? Or the uproar if Ryan Callahan of the lionized New York Rangers had complained about a conspiracy to push the series longer? Or the furor if Joe Thornton had done what Quick did after the Sharks gave up a similar late-game 5-on-3 advantage that allowed the Kings to tie Game 1?

What it boils down to is being a sore loser.

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

One of the worst things about the NHL today is that its supplementary discipline system is a joke. The maddening inconsistency that generally comes out of it during the regular season absolutely goes through the roof once the playoffs start.

Take, for example, the fact that the infamous Senators/Canadiens brawl game, which was rife with attempts to injure and other dirty plays, resulted in zero suspensions or fines. While there was likely a behind-closed-doors scolding for both teams from the league's Department of Player Safety, the issue was (and is, I suppose) that there is little to no transparency about it.

I remember it wasn't so long ago that Brendan Shanahan vowed to occasionally release videos explaining why certain controversial hits or incidents did not result in any supplementary discipline, and the league has very occasionally followed through on that. Not enough, perhaps, for fans to have some semblance of understanding of what the decision-making process is, but sufficient to placate the angry hordes massing at the castle walls whenever a particularly egregious incident leads to nothing at all.

But that goes away in the postseason.

(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers who hated them the most. Here is Puck Daddy’s own Ryan Lambert, fondly recalling the Washington Capitals. Again: This is a roast and you will be offended by it, so don't take it so seriously.)

We are gathered here today to mourn not only the loss of the Washington Capitals, but also the loss of their chances of reasonably competing for a Stanley Cup any time in even the relatively near future.

You tend to hear a lot of talk about how one team or another has a "window" in which they can reasonably win the Stanley Cup. San Jose, for example, has had its window open and close so many times — by the media's reckoning — that Doug Wilson finally installed a revolving door to save on energy.

Another team for whom we hear entirely too much about their "window" is the Washington Capitals.

But the thing about that is if it was open at all any more (and frankly, it probably wasn't), it was open in the way that smokers crack their window on the highway, and that horrible high-pitched sound of wind rushing in so loud that you can't hear the radio any more was the voice of a thousand Alex Ovechkin apologists who wanted nothing more than for that incredible back half of the season to once again be reality, rather than outlier.

Just as death is inevitable, so too was this result; the kind of slow, heavy train you could feel coming miles away if you touched your hand to the track, its whistle a deep and mournful cry carried to you by the wind.

Of course the Capitals were going to trip in the first round. It couldn't happen any other way. Because, with the Capitals goes the Southeast Division, and nothing in the history of hockey has ever been more fitting than the last-ever champion of the worst division in the history of professional sports than losing at home to a six-seed that finished the regular season with one fewer point.

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

One of the things people said constantly throughout the Pittsburgh Penguins' six-game series victory over the New York Islanders was that their play was well below the expected level of quality.

In fact, the most common refrain was that this particular brand of awful play -- rife with defensive irresponsibility and baffling lack of execution for a team that was pretty much incredible from start to finish this year -- was probably only good enough to get them past a try-hard pretender like the Islanders.

Against a real team, it was generally agreed, this kind of play would result in them losing the series in short order, probably pretty badly.

But that kind of talk ignores two things. First, we were told repeatedly by just about everyone that if there was any team the Penguins, not exactly fleet-of-foot, didn't want to take on in the playoffs, it was these New York Islanders. And yeah, they had their hands full throughout, but still never really looked to be in all that much trouble; the scores were close, yes, but they still only needed six games to put these guys out of their misery.

Second, and more important, is that — lo and behold — the second they took Marc-Andre Fleury out of the crease, they won both games. That's not to say that Tomas Vokoun really won them either game, because he didn't. He posted a shutout in Game 5 because almost any goaltender in the world (with at least one notable exception) would have, but he was also victimized on occasion by the bad defensive work that didn't help Fleury much either.

But the fact of the matter is that if you have pretensions of winning a Stanley Cup, your goaltender has to at least be league-average. The Penguins, with their galaxy of stars and excellent coach and top-quality GM, have that goal. They do not have that goaltender. People will argue that Fleury is a winner, insofar as he won a Stanley Cup. Four years ago. Since that postseason, when he posted just a .908 save percentage and a not-good 2.61 GAA, his save percentage has crept above .899 precisely zero times. This year, when he gave up 14 goals on 128 shots in four games before Bylsma dead-bolted the door to the doghouse from the outside.

Or at least, he should; there's only so many times an entire team can roll its eyes and think, "Oh no, not again," like a pot of petunias, before it's the only reasonable course of action.

I don't know how much longer we need to suffer through the narrative that Fleury is any good at all before it crumbles to sand and is scattered by the wind. That is, if it hasn't done so already behind save attempts like this and this and most notably this.

I mean, look, the fact of the matter is that apart from one good playoff run five years ago in which he fell a game short of winning the Stanley Cup for that not-quite-ready Penguins team, he has always been sub-average, and now things are getting markedly worse.

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

Hockey fans are, in my experience, the most conspiratorially-inclined of any group like them, and so it should be no surprise that in the course of these playoffs we've already seen numerous accusations of bias playing into the results of entire series.

These accusations aren't coming not from fans on Twitter or, worse, SportsYapper, who always have a roll or two of tinfoil ready so Gary Bettman's HAARP system cannot read or control their brainwaves; but, rather, from actual respected news sites where respectable writers post their thoughts on the goings-on for their teams is, well, silly.

Homerism is always going to exist in sports media, just by the nature of what the job requires: Reporters are around the guys whose work they must critique just about every day for literally half the year, and talk to them, and grow familiar with them, and in many cases come to like them. And honestly, the stuff you read now, in 2013, is far less fraught with rah-rah gamers and bad-luck bemoaning that reports of yesteryear contained.

Which is what makes stuff like Jason Botchford's petulant boo-hooism earlier this week — hilariously entitled "The Canucks got screwed by the refs. Of course they did." — stand out as being so peculiar.

We know the Vancouver area is at its heart one that feels the world closes in around it whenever things go even slightly sideways, but nothing in the media has, to my knowledge, ever been quite so avert in its accusations.

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

No one is going to sit here and disagree that wide-open hockey is preferable to the brand displayed by teams trying to grind out wins.

No one likes board play. No one likes a thousand guys standing in the neutral zone during breakouts. No one — as we learned when the Rangers did it last year — likes the focus to be on blocking shots. No one likes obstruction.

For this reason, we are told so very often that the most important things officials can do in the playoffs is "let the boys play."

It's a fun concept. When the whistles are away, teams are allowed to play at 5-on-5 hockey which is obviously the best way to determine which is better. Ideally, all 60 minutes of every playoff game would be played at even strength. But the problem with this insistence on letting guys play is that when you do so, they tend to start committing penalties, and that, in turn, necessitates that, at some point, some of the infractions actually have to be called.

So while it's all well and good to say that for the sanctity of any individual game to be upheld, the referees should certainly not start blowing the whistle and sending guys to the box, the fact of the matter is that it's their jobs to do so. Guys break the rules, guys go to the box.

This, for some reason, doesn't make sense to people at all times.

Take, for example, Brian Strait's penalty on Sidney Crosby in overtime yesterday afternoon, a call which resulted in the Penguins' power play overtime game-winner. That it was called in overtime was somehow this egregious thing, according to Mike Milbury and Jeremy Roenick and a thousand thousand Internet commenters, a decision made by a referee overstepping his bounds.

Had this call — which was the right one because Strait got beat on the inside, took his hand off his stick and pulled Crosby down from behind, easy-ish fall or not — been made in the first period, the number of eyebrows it raised around the hockey universe would have been precisely zero. This is the kind of thing that typically happens when a coach puts a decent enough defenseman like Brian Strait on the ice in a high-leverage situation against a generational talent like Sidney Crosby, after all.

But that it happened in overtime was somehow outrageous.

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

I've seen it said that a big reason for the blowouts is that the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders are inexperienced. That could be it. But perhaps it's more likely that these are just not very bad teams running into very good teams, as they are wont to do in the early rounds of the playoffs.

Such is the problem with watching the Eastern Conference for the majority of the year, because you start to take for granted just how good teams that finish at the bottom of the playoff pool really aren't. You'll note that the Islanders came into the postseason as one of the streaking-est teams in the league, if not the outright hottest, having taken points from all but two of their final 17 games, 11 of which were played away from Nassau Coliseum.

Despite this, very few people gave them much of a shot of beating the Penguins, and deservedly so. The Penguins are far and away the second-best team in the league, and actually entered the playoffs on the upswing from their already exceptional majority of the regular season. Anyone who picked them to win the series in more than, say, five games was being absurdly generous to the Islanders for reasons that seem difficult to grasp.

So it came as no surprise to most that the Islanders went out in Game 1 and got their heads caved in. The game ended 5-0 but could have been a lot worse; the Penguins barely had their legs under them to start and the Islanders had most of the early possession, and predictably did nothing with it. By the time Pascal Dupuis scored midway through, the game had already been turned on its ear by a Beau Bennett opening goal against the run of play.

Yeah, shots finished at 26 apiece but anyone who watched it saw that the biggest positive for the Islanders is that James Neal might now be out for a while thanks to a hit from Travis Hamonic. That's not much to take away from a game in which you looked hopelessly unprepared and overmatched.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

The thing that's great about the Stanley Cup Playoffs is that any team can knock off any other one, regardless of seeding or apparent quality. A seven-game series is short, obviously, but it seems as though the NHL produces more postseason upsets on a regular basis than baseball, basketball or football.

But this year, I don't care about any of that. I want the favorites to lay waste to the competition with displays of power both horrible and impressive, so that they can meet for what could be the most entertaining Cup Final in years. The Chicago Blackhawks and Pittsburgh Penguins are the runaway best teams in the League this year and with good reason: They're deep everywhere and very, very good at everything. Playing each other for the best trophy in sports would produce by far the most attractive hockey in these playoffs.

Just think about it: Both teams' first two lines might be the best top-six groups in the sport, with the Penguins having bolstered theirs at the deadline, and the Blackhawks having entered the season with theirs. They're just so deep up front. Pittsburgh has 11 players with 20 or more points this season; Chicago nine. Their D corps are likewise both very deep, though you'd probably prefer to have Joel Quenneville's guys than Dan Bylsma's.

In net, Corey Crawford's numbers obviously stand out this season, but it wasn't so long ago that his save percentage was below league average, and that leads one to suspect he's more or less at Marc-Andre Fleury's level overall, which is to say slightly above average.

I understand that it's not fun to root for the clear No. 1 seeds who were the only teams to break 70 points in the standings, but they're the heavy favorites for a reason. Pummeling eight- and five-seeds and four-seeds isn't the most exciting path to the Final, and all the romanticizing of the underdog story from the Kings last season shows exactly why. But when you don't have a rooting interest, fans should want to see the most interesting hockey possible, and Blackhawks/Penguins is most certainly that. I'm willing to sit through a mediocre, unsurprising first three rounds if the Final is a classic.

A fully operational Penguins team taking on the Presidents' Trophy-winning Blackhawks are all anyone should ever want or need out of these playoffs, because it would be absolutely gorgeous.