NHL playoff predictions 2017: Confidence high in Blackhawks, Capitals

The NHL playoffs get started Wednesday night, and arguably more than any year in recent memory, it’s a wide open competition. Parity has seeped into the foundation of the NHL to the point that there are roughly 10 teams that could conceivably win the Stanley Cup without anyone batting an eye.

That should make for a thrilling few months in the hockey world, and it also makes predicting these series especially difficult. There’s no obvious Stanley Cup favorite, even if people seem to be lining up behind the Capitals and Blackhawks. Most analysts probably don’t feel particularly confident about those predictions. (Or maybe that’s just me projecting).

But that won’t stop us from making our own guesses on how the 2017 Stanley Cup Final will go, even though you’ll probably walk away from reading this thinking we’re a bunch of homers because most of us picked the Blackhawks. That’s probably part logic, part intuition, part blind optimism.

With that in mind, here are Second City Hockey’s 2017 NHL playoff predictions.

2017 Stanley Cup Playoff picks