Detroit Red Wings head coach Mike Babcock directs his team during the third period of Game 3 of a first-round NHL hockey playoff series against the Boston Bruins in Detroit, Tuesday, April 22, 2014. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

[Author's note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn't tell you anything you didn't know. Who's hot, who's not, who cares? For this reason, we're doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You'll see what I mean.]

7. Guarantees

Alex Ovechkin is human garbage to make a guarantee!!!!!!!

Not like Great Leader Mark Messier, who is a perfect angel. Ovechkin is bad.

6. Blind faith

On some level you have to stick by your guy if you let him fire the coach and steer your team rather cavalierly into the ground — you don't want to look ineffectual, after all — but the extent to which Sharks owner Hasso Plattner defended Doug Wilson this week was simply breathtaking. A small sampling follows.

Hoping Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau, in their advanced age, will improve:

“We are in this rebuild process. Reset, rebuild. There’s no question. Everybody knows when you look at our players, two top stars are getting older. They are both fit. That’s the good news. They haven’t had any major injury like other players. We hope that they can continue to play at that level, or even beef it up a little bit and lead the young ones we have put in to become a strong team.”

Relying on guys in their late 30s to guide you through a rebuild seems antithetical to the point of a rebuild, but maybe that's just me.

Why Doug Wilson still has a job:

“So we have to continue on our way. You ask about Doug. Doug started this, we discussed this restructuring, I use a different word. Two years ago, when do we do it? We still had these top stars, and how do we do it? We were full of hope that we can even go through without losing too much in performance.

If the guy who got your team broken down to the point it needed a rebuild (debatable by the way) is the guy in charge of guiding you out of that ditch, and actively makes the team worse, isn't that bad? Speaking of which...

The team's shortcomings:

“In the end, we will talk about financial issues, but it is his job to do these negotiations, find us the players. You know, as everybody knows, we need a defenseman or two, and we need probably a better fourth line. Then we will have a good team again.”

A defenseman or two and a good fourth line. Well, it's tough to find defensemen, but let's review Wilson's fourth-line moves this past summer. They were all bad, you say? Hmm.

5. Divisional playoffs in the West

The Western Conference Finals are set between Anaheim and Chicago, and those two teams sound just about right based on what we knew going in. They were, on paper, clearly the best the West had to offer.

But their paths to the second round included a grand total of three losses combined. Chicago put down Nashville in six and swept Minnesota, while Anaheim bounced Winnipeg in four and Calgary in five. How much of this is due to the fact that was a little weak this year? Probably a lot, but also the divisional playoffs allowed Calgary — a truly bad team — a path to the second round to face a club against which they could offer little resistance. Chicago likewise ran into a team in the second round that simply wasn't as good and never could have hoped to be.

Would things have been a little more entertaining in 1v8, 2v7, etc. format. Anaheim would have slaughtered Calgary in the first round, instead. Chicago would have run Vancouver over. St. Louis vs. Winnipeg could have been a decent series, same for Nashville vs. Minnesota. That, it seems, would have produced more competitive second-round matchups, especially if the higher seeds advanced out of all of them.

The Western Conference Semifinals were a joke, completed in just nine total games. Hopefully it's just a one-year thing but it could also very easily not-be. If it becomes this easy to make the Conference Final in the West going forward, you might as well not even play the first two rounds.

4. Appendectomies

Poor Ryan Callahan misses Game 6 last night because his appendix acts up on him. Awful break given that even he's not been great in these playoffs, you don't want to have to slot anyone into an elimination game on short notice. He could be out a while, which also complicates matters.

Story continues