Game 5 Thoughts

[der meister 3,187]

Back to the wildcard playoffs for Ryuji Sakamoto. Offensively, this has been his best year, and yet he continuously seems to find himself on teams that struggle to put the puck in the net. I'm not sure how much of that is a byproduct of Ryuji's defense-first mentality causing chemistry issues, perhaps, but then I remember he put up a point per game for a big chunk of the season and finished north of 50 points. In fact, approximately a third of the goals scored by the Seattle Bears this season had Ryuji Sakamoto's name attached to them. As of the time of me writing this, Seattle and Chicago are tied at 2 games apiece in their best of 5 series, with Chicago having a +5 goal differential, a pretty remarkable number considering it's only been 4 games. What this tells me, at least, is that if Seattle is going to advance, they're going to need to play tight defense, something that Sakamoto excels at.