Welcome again to the Fearful Porpentine

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.

This is from Act 1 of Hamlet, but it's pretty much how I feel about Boston's powerplay. Best not take any penalties.

So, we're nearly ready to get started. Games start on Wednesday night, so everyone needs to get their picks in by 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time on April 15th. You should be able to enter your own data in your spreadsheet, but you can always email Dean with your picks.

Here's a plan for how we choose the winner: everyone gets a point for picking a winner in the first round, two points for the second round, three points for the third round, and four points for correctly choosing the Stanley Cup winner. So perfect picks give you 8 points in round 1, 8 points in the quarter-finals, 6 points in the semi-finals, and 4 points in the finals = 26 points. If there's a tie, we'll add up the # of games picks. Losers won't go home empty-handed; they'll get The Fearful Porpentine home edition, which will provide hours of amusement in the dark hours ahead.

Everyone, feel free to add posts to this blog, or comments to any post. Contact Dean if you want write access to the blog itself; you'll need a gmail account.

P.S. Remember, you can change your picks any time up to Wednesday night. Note that a bunch of Flames are just now coming off the injury list; this will have an impact on the Calgary-Chicago series!

P.P.S. Note that the NHL re-seeds for each round, so the highest seed left plays the lowest seed. So this isn't a true bracket like the NCAA Basketball tournament. You may need to move teams around in the second round, like Marc did with Pittsburgh and Carolina.