I miss the Stanley Cup playoffs. Reporting on them. Writing about them. Running around from city to city day to day for two months at a time.

I'll still watch, though. And I'll still invest. Hockey's still hockey.

In Winnipeg, beginning tonight, the NHL's No. 1 team in the regular season will bring the one, the only, the original Whiteout to the beautiful heart of Manitoba with Game 1 against the Blues, and they'll do it as only then can:

Accept no pale imitations. 

I'm out of the predictions business, but I've got five predominant feelings in the present on the field as a whole, and I'll offer them here in bullet form:

• The Jets are one of the league's top-scoring teams, the top defensive team, and they've got the greatest goaltender in the world in Connor Hellebuyck. What they did over a full season wasn't a fluke. At the same time ... I'm not sold. I don't see them as some overwhelming favorite in almost any matchup out west, not even against the Blues, who really rose up over the past month. Hellebuyck will have to shake the regular-season-only rap. Josh Morrissey and Neal Pionk will need depth support on the back end. And all that scoring, still headlined by Mark Scheifele, it's going to need a big-game version of Kyle Connor, not the one Mike Sullivan justifiably scratched in the 4 Nations championship game. We'll see.

• Everyone seems to sing about the West, in general, but I'm not seeing it. The Jets and Golden Knights are legit 1-2 in the conference, but the Stars don't have Miro Heiskanen and lost their final seven games, including being utterly dominated by the Penguins in Dallas. The Kings are awesome at home, awful on the road. The Avalanche added a ton after mindlessly subtracting Mikko Rantanen, but that hasn't snapped together. The Wild just got Kirill Kaprizov back after an injury that cost him half the season, and that'll be asking a ton of his recovery. And the Oilers, still employing Stuart Skinner in goal behind Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, have shown next to none of that mojo that just got them within a goal of winning it all last summer. 

• The battle of Florida's back, and it'll be fascinating. For one, the most impressive team I've seen in person over the past two months was the Lightning. They aren't just Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, Andrei Vasilevskiy and, of course, Jake Guentzel. They come in waves. They're big, strong, fast, deep. They're good enough that Brayden Point, Brandon Hagel and Anthony Cirelli didn't get typed into this entry until now. They've got -- get this -- seven 20-goal scorers, plus Hedman's 15 from the blue line. Whereas the Panthers have shown some Cup hangover effects, they still don't know about Matthew Tkachuk's health and I'll bet it'll take a while longer to figure out what to do with Brad Marchand.

• The Capitals rapid rise was one of the NHL's most uplifting storylines, even setting aside Alexander Ovechkin's grand achievement. They rebuilt on the fly, setting a model that several of the Penguins this week acknowledged presents a template for them, as well. But show me the goaltending without Logan Thompson, who hasn't seen action since April 2 due to injury, this after an absurd 31-6-6 season. He skated here at PPG Paints Arena the other morning but not with the team. If he can't go, even the Canadiens, with Russian teen sensation Ivan Demidov just added to the fold, can pull the upset.

• Everyone really needs to stop saying the Maple Leafs haven't won the Cup since 1967. The proper verbiage is that the Leafs haven't even made it to the Final since that year, the last one before the NHL doubled to a dozen teams. They won't this year, either, even after an East-leading 52 wins amid the likely last run of their perpetually losing stars Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander. Consider it the end of an error. Maybe even at the other Ontario team's hands.

And no, that scarcely counts as a prediction.