At the beginning of last season I made my NHL predictions: http://kindohm.com/archive/2007/10/05/nhl-2007-2008-predictions.aspx.  I also made some playoff predictions recently: http://kindohm.com/archive/2008/04/06/2008-nhl-playoff-predictions.aspx.  At the beginning of last season, I had Detroit playing through to the conference finals...  that was as close as I got to predicting a winner.  They advanced another round farther and won the cup.  I never predicted the Penguins to even get into the playoffs, and they surprised me.  Their youthful team proved they have the endurance to go the distance in the playoffs.  I thought for sure they'd need a few more years of experience under their belts to get as far as they did this year.

Good for Detroit - a lot of people hate them, but they have a lot of classy and highly-skilled players on their team.  They deserved to win the cup.  Detroit builds through drafting and they, like Pittsburgh, have a lot of great, young talent.  Detroit will have a good team for years to come because of their youth - which is bad for the Wild in the western conference.

Next season will be interesting...  the NHL will be making more changes to rules and regulations - especially around goalie equipment.  I'm glad that the NHL is evolving little by little.  It'd be nice to see even more offense and more emphasis on scoring in the near future. 

As for the 2008 entry draft - I hope the Wild find a scorer.  Their current scoring talent is a bit shallow and having just one more goal-scorer on the team would be a huge benefit.  Arguably - young players like Sheppard and Pouliot may fill that gap, but they're just rookies.  They may not develop into players that score a lot of goals.  I'm optimistic that they will be though - look at how Koivu has developed over time.  I'd love to have a team full of Mikki Koivus in a few years!