The last team to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs—and one that needed a shootout victory in its final game of the regular season just to do so—probably shouldn’t be one of the last teams still in the hunt for the National Hockey League’s top prize. And yet the Philadelphia Flyers have not only earned the right to be in the final, they look poised to put up more of a fight against Chicago than any other team the Blackhawks have faced this spring.

Despite finishing with 11 fewer wins and 24 fewer points than the Hawks during a rocky regular season, the Flyers can forget about all that, wipe the slate clean, and take their best shot in their quest for the cup.

This is a team that fired a head coach two months into an underachieving season and one that is relying on a third-string goalie who had never suited up for an NHL playoff game prior to this season. In fact, the only reason Michael Leighton has had the chance to become one of the best stories of these playoffs is injuries to the two guys ahead of him on the Flyers' goaltending depth chart. Claimed off waivers from Carolina in mid-December, Leighton is one of five goalies the Flyers used this season. Not one of them started more than 30 games, and none of them managed to win more than 16. It’s hardly the tried-and-true recipe for postseason success. But it’s working for the Flyers, who haven’t looked back since rallying from a series in which they dropped the first three games against Boston and then roared back with four straight wins to advance.

Including a fifth-game victory over Montreal in the Eastern Conference final, the Flyers have now won seven of their last eight hockey games and appear to be hitting their stride at precisely the right time.

Philadelphia has plenty of scoring depth and a solid top four on defence. The Flyers may not have as much overall talent as Chicago, but they certainly won’t back down from the Blackhawks’ physical challenge and may initiate more contact than any team the Hawks have seen in these playoffs.

There won’t be many in the hockey world who give Philadelphia much of a chance when the Stanley Cup final begins on Saturday (May 29). But the Flyers have quickly become a prime example of how meaningless the NHL’s exhaustive regular season really is. Against all odds, Philadelphia has had all the pieces of the puzzle come together at the perfect moment. There are lots of reasons why the Flyers shouldn’t win the Stanley Cup, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.

While Philadelphia and Chicago duke it out for the Stanley Cup, the San Jose Sharks will spend the off-season wondering where things went wrong. Again. Just like last year, and the year before that, and a bunch of years before that, too. At the far end from Philadelphia on the spectrum of hard-to-figure-out hockey teams, the Sharks are a fascinating study in futility.

There is so much to like in the way the team has been constructed over the years, and yet every season at this time the story ends in the same disappointing fashion: without a sniff of the Stanley Cup. Not only have the Sharks never been to the final, the organization has never won more than 10 games in any one playoff run.

But it’s hardly from a lack of trying. And that’s what makes the Sharks so interesting.

Since the NHL lockout, general manager Doug Wilson has pulled the trigger on three of the biggest trades in the league, acquiring Joe Thornton, Dan Boyle, and Dany Heatley. All of those moves have come despite claims from so many of his counterparts that it’s virtually impossible to make big trades in the salary-cap era. Wilson hasn’t been afraid to move draft picks and prospects for the opportunity to add big names with large contracts.

He’s fired his head coach, replacing Ron Wilson with Todd McLellan after the team bowed out of the playoffs prematurely in 2008.

The Sharks made waves in the hockey world by taking the fairly drastic measure of stripping the captain’s C off the sweater of Patrick Marleau a few seasons back in an effort to shake things up.

The team has developed a number of its own draft picks into full-time NHL players and completely overhauled its cast of grinders and role players. Almost everything San Jose has done in recent years looked at the time like an improvement, with the ultimate goal to make the team a cup contender.

And yet the Sharks are no further ahead than they were in 2004, when they got to the third round of the playoffs, and every year since have become the preseason favourites to finally get over the playoff hump. And this year was no different.

In the past four seasons, the Sharks have shown their teeth, winning a total of 204 regular-season contests, but when it comes time to sink or swim, they’ve managed just 22 victories at playoff time. This year they were swept in the third round by Chicago.

And so it’s bound to be another interesting off-season in the Bay Area watching what one of the top teams in hockey does in an effort to get better. The window of opportunity can’t stay open forever, and time will eventually run out for one of the best collections of hockey talent to shed the underachiever label and make something happen when it matters most. Maybe it’ll happen next year. Then again, maybe it won’t.

Jeff Paterson is a talk-show host on Vancouver’s all-sports radio, Team 1040. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/patersonjeff/.