We keep breaking even in these later rounds of guessing, after going 6-2 on our first-round picks for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. We did get the Florida Panthers prediction correct, even down to the number of games, in the Eastern Conference Finals, but we did not get the right team or number of games even in the Western Conference Finals. We’re happy to see the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup Finals, however.

Now, comes the hard part … picking the champion.

Florida Panthers vs. Edmonton Oilers: The Panthers will have home-ice advantage, and they were the top team in the NHL this season sabermetrically. That’s 2 marks in the Florida column. The Eastern Conference champs (repeating now, too) also had more regulation wins than the Edmonton Oilers did, as well. Finally, the Panthers have the edge in scoring differential, too. That’s a clean sweep of our usual metrics, and we don’t see the NHL pulling the same TV-revenue shenanigans as other leagues. So … that means Florida in 4 games, right? Well, we rarely pick sweeps unless it’s just brutally obvious, and in this case, the Oilers have small-to-middling deficits in each of our metrics explored above in this column.

Edmonton has played 1 extra game to get here: the Game 7 on the road in Vancouver in the Western Conference semifinals. We like the pluck of the Oilers to win their last 2 series without home-ice advantage, but the Panthers just did the same in the ECF matchup against the New York Rangers. Each team has psychological motivation here: Florida lost last year’s Cup Finals, and Edmonton wants to win it all for Canada for the first time in 31 seasons. Since then, Canadian teams are 0-5 in the Stanley Cup Finals.

Ouch.

Canadians not only don’t get here very often anymore, but they aren’t winning it, either. That’s pressure, in addition to emotion, on the Oilers—and since the team has 7 former Top 10 picks of its own on the roster (8 overall), there’s a lot of individual pressure here, too, since Edmonton has come up so short in the last handful of seasons, based on expectations of that elite, homegrown talent. We’re probably reading too much into this, but we just don’t think the Oilers are ready yet, even if they got here to relieve some pressure. Hockey seems to have a learning curve more often than not for first-time playoff experiences.

We give the Edmonton home crowd a single bone to celebrate in either Game 3 or Game 4, but we expect the Panthers to handle this more professionally and win it on home ice in Game 5. There you have it. Of course, the last 2 teams we used for a photo in these predictive pieces lost (Carolina and Dallas), so take all this with a grain of salt while remembering the motto in the masthead: we’re often wrong yet never in doubt.