Swede-heavy Western Conference Final a sign of the times

NASHVILLE — “I have worn his underwear,” Mattias Ekholm was saying after practice. “They are comfy.”

It used to take big meatballs to be a Swede in the National Hockey League, in the days when Fred Stanfield chugged up and down the wing among the NHL’s Original 12. “The more barbaric, archaic times of hockey,” as Anaheim Ducks head coach Randy Carlyle said Wednesday.