NHL playoffs arrive with the West stacked with contenders like Colorado, Dallas and Vegas

Jake Oettinger wants it this way. Or, at least, the starting goaltender for Dallas is embracing it.

The path through the Central Division to the Western Conference Final for his team and the Minnesota Wild is just about as treacherous as it gets. The Stars and Wild had the third- and seventh-most points in the NHL this season and they will meet in the first round — with the winner potentially facing the league-best Colorado Avalanche in the second.

“If you can get through that and win it all, I think it just makes it that much better,” Oettinger said. “It just makes it more fulfilling.”

Maybe not so much for the team going home early. But the Stanley Cup does not come easy, and even the Pacific Division side of the bracket is no cakewalk with Edmonton, the Stanley Cup runner-up the past two years, in the mix along with the Vegas Golden Knights, who won seven of their final eight games since hiring John Tortorella.

“It’s the most exciting time because everybody’s playing at a different level, and it’s a good test to see how high you can get as a team,” Tortorella told reporters in Las Vegas after the regular season finale. “Everything’s going to be amped up. As each game goes by in the series, it’s going to be harder and harder, and so it’s a great challenge ”

— The Presidents' Trophy-winning Avalanche are the favorites to win the West, and with good reason. They've been the best team since October, have two of the best players in the world in Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar, and filled their center void by reacquiring 2022 Cup champion Nazem Kadri at the trade deadline.

Home-ice advantage is a plus, but being the team to beat also comes with pressure. The Avs, who open against Los Angeles, say bring it on.

“Pressure is a privilege — it’s the old cliche, but it truly is,” forward Logan O'Connor said. "You just have to be dialed in the whole time, and I think that’s the challenge for any team. There can’t be any lapses. You can’t have any passengers. Everyone all in, all the time. I think we obviously have the capability to do that.”

— Vegas won the Pacific after replacing Bruce Cassidy with Tortorella, who is coaching in the NHL playoffs for a 13th time with his fourth team.

— Dallas has made three consecutive trips to the West final. They have all the weapons, certainly if they get standout defenseman Miro Heiskanen back healthy.

“It’s never a straight line to win all these things,” said first-year coach Glen Gulutzan, who was an Edmonton assistant when the Oilers made back-to-back trips to the Cup final. “You keep getting yourself back in the dance and win a round and win two rounds, and then finally you break through. Hopefully that experience is going to allow us to do it.”

— Minnesota had Kirill Kaprizov grabbing headlines for years, and next season he will begin the richest contract in hockey history. Now Matt Boldy is sharing the load on a team that lacks only center depth to keep them from being a solid favorite to reach the West final.

— Calling Connor McDavid and the Oilers underdogs is rich — they took Florida to seven games and then six games in the Cup Final the past two years — but they have played a lot of hockey They are going to need key saves in net along with Leon Draisaitl in good form whenever he returns from his regular season-ending injury.

— The Utah Mammoth are the feel-good story in the West, making the playoffs in the franchise's second season since moving to Utah from Arizona. They could play like they have nothing to lose because just making it is cause for celebration in Salt Lake City.

— Los Angeles fired coach Jim Hiller and righted the ship under interim replacement D.J. Smith. Acquiring Artemi Panarin in a February trade also makes the Kings dangerous.

— Will we get an LA story? Joe Quenneville and his three Cup rings have gotten Anaheim into the playoffs, and with his experience the young Ducks are not only fun to watch but have the goaltending with Lukas Dostal to potentially pull off an upset or two.

— The two-year, $25 million contract extension McDavid signed without a raise essentially put the Oilers on notice that they have two more chances to show they can win the Stanley Cup. It's entirely possible he puts the cape on and carries them back to the final for a third year in a row.

— Colorado's window as a Cup favorite remains open, with captain Gabriel Landeskog a year removed from his emotional return back after dealing with a chronic knee injury to assist MacKinnon and Makar. Perhaps they go on another title run like four years ago.

— Can Minnesota win a playoff series for the first time since 2015? The Wild have lost their last eight opening-round series, but for the first time they went an entire season without getting shut out and their offense with Quinn Hughes added on the blue line provides some confidence.

"There’s a lot of pushback with our team," coach John Hynes said. “We have guys that can score. One of the things we talk about is trying to create offense in multiple ways.”

First round: Colorado sweeps Los Angeles in four games; Minnesota beats Dallas in six; Vegas beats Utah in five; Edmonton beats Anaheim in five.

Second round: Colorado beats Minnesota in five; Vegas beats Edmonton in six.

Conference final: Colorado beats Vegas in seven.

AP Sports Writers Pat Graham in Denver and Dave Campbell in St. Paul, Minnesota, contributed.

AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

Dallas Stars teammates celebrate victory following a shootout of an NHL hockey game against the Buffalo Sabres Wednesday, April 15, 2026, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/Jeffrey T. Barnes)

Edmonton Oilers' Vasily Podkolzin (92), Connor McDavid (97) and Evan Bouchard (2) celebrate after a goal against the Colorado Avalanche during second-period NHL hockey game action in Edmonton,Alberta, Monday, April 13, 2026. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press via AP)

Vegas Golden Knights head coach John Tortorella, back right, stands on the bench behind Colton Sissons, left to right, Cole Smith and Ivan Barbashev during the second period of an NHL hockey game against the Vancouver Canucks, in Vancouver, on Tuesday, April 7, 2026. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)

Minnesota Wild's Michael McCarron (47) controls the puck ahead of Anaheim Ducks' Leo Carlsson (91) during the third period of an NHL hockey game Tuesday, April 14, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Lily Dozier)

Colorado Avalanche's Gabriel Landeskog, center, celebrates his goal against the Calgary Flames with Brett Kulak, left, and Martin Necas during the third period of an NHL hockey game in Calgary, Alberta, Tuesday, April 14, 2026. (Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press via AP)

LUANDA, Angola (AP) — Pope Leo XIV called Sunday for Angolans to fight the “scourge of corruption” with a culture of justice as he opened a poignant day in his African odyssey that will take the American pope to an epicenter of the African slave trade.

Leo celebrated Mass before an estimated 100,000 people outside the capital and again sought to encourage Angolans. He denounced the exploitation of their mineral-rich land and people, who still bear the scars of a brutal, post-independence civil war.

“We wish to build a country where old divisions are overcome once and for all, where hatred and violence disappear, and where the scourge of corruption is healed by a new culture of justice and sharing,” Leo said in his homily in Kilamba, a Chinese-built development about 25 kilometers (15 miles) outside the capital.

Later Sunday, Leo will celebrate the Rosary prayer at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, an important Catholic shrine on the edge of the Kwanza River about 110 kilometers (70 miles) south of Luanda.

The Church of Our Lady of Muxima, built by Portuguese colonizers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex, became a hub in the slave trade. It was where enslaved Africans were gathered to be baptized by Portuguese priests before being forced to walk to the port of Luanda to be put on ships to the Americas.

While it's a popular Catholic shrine today, its history is emblematic of the Catholic Church’s role in the slave trade hundreds of years ago, the forced baptisms of enslaved people and what some scholars say is the Holy See’s continued refusal to fully acknowledge it and atone for it.

The visit is particularly significant because the Creole ancestors of the first U.S.-born pope include enslaved people and slave owners, according to genealogical research.

“For Black Catholics, Pope Leo’s visit to the Muxima shrine is an important moment of healing,” said Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch Center, Oxford University.

She noted that many Black Catholics are Catholic because of slavery and the “Code Noir,” which she said required slaves purchased by Catholic owners to be baptized in the church.

“Others were already Catholic when they were trafficked from Angola to slave holding colonies,” said Butler, a Black Catholic scholar whose maternal family hails from Louisiana, where the pope’s ancestors also had their roots.

Angola’s Portuguese colonizers were emboldened by 15th-century directives from the Vatican that authorized them to enslave non-Christians.

In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere, said the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”

The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas, and justified slavery.

The Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and were not to be enslaved.

Kellerman recalled that most of the 12.5 million Africans who were direct victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were sold into slavery by other Africans and were not captured by Europeans.

“That being said, at the time of the building of Muxima, the Portuguese were doing both — buying enslaved people and colonizing/slave raiding. So they were fully using their papal permissions during this time,” he said in emailed comments to The Associated Press.

He said the first pope to condemn slavery itself was Pope Leo XIII, the current pope’s namesake and inspiration, in two encyclicals in 1888 and 1890. But Kellerman said that pope and others since have continued to perpetuate the “false narrative” that the Holy See was always against slavery, when the historical record says otherwise.

While Leo's visit to Muxima was in honor of its role as a shrine, Kellerman said he hoped that the visit would also give Leo a chance to learn more about the history of the slave trade.

“The popes repeatedly authorized Portugal’s colonization efforts in Africa and Portuguese participation in the slave trade, but the Vatican has never fully admitted this,” he said. “It would be so powerful if at some point Pope Leo were to apologize for the popes’ role in the trade.”

During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade. In 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”

According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo's American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates reported in an essay in the New York Times.

Gates, a Harvard University professor who hosts the popular PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots,” presented his research to Leo during a July 5 audience at the Vatican. According to a report of their meeting in The Harvard Gazette, “The pope asked about ancestors, both Black and white, who were enslavers.”

Leo has not spoken publicly about his family heritage or the Gates research, and some Black Catholic scholars are hesitant to impose on him a narrative about his identity that he himself has not yet addressed publicly.

“It’s important that we tell our own stories,” said Tia Noelle Pratt, a sociologist of religion and professor at Villanova University, the pope’s alma mater.

“We haven’t heard anything from him about what he thinks about it, and so to impose anything on him, I think would be completely inappropriate,” said Pratt, author of “Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African-American Catholic Experience.”

Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retired archbishop of Washington and the first African American cardinal, said he was “delighted” to have facilitated the encounter.

“It’s one of the things that I think for many African Americans and people of color, they identify with great pride the pope has roots in our own heritage,” Gregory said. “And I think he’s happy about that too, because it’s another link to the people that he tries to serve and is called to serve.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Pope Leo XIV arrives in Kilamba, some 30 kilometers south of Luanda, Angola, to preside over Sunday Mass, Sunday, April 19, 2026, on the seventh day of an 11-day apostolic journey to Africa. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

People walk by the Church of Our Lady of Muxima in Muxima, Angola, Saturday, April 11, 2026, which Pope Leo XIV will visit during his 11-day pastoral visit to Africa. (AP Photo)

Pope Leo XIV presides over Sunday Mass, Sunday, April 19, 2026, in Kilamba, some 30 kilometers south of Luanda, Angola, on the seventh day of an 11-day apostolic journey to Africa. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Leo XIV arrives in Kilamba, some 30 kilometers south of Luanda, Angola, to preside over Sunday Mass, Sunday, April 19, 2026, on the seventh day of an 11-day apostolic journey to Africa. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Leo XIV presides over Sunday Mass, Sunday, April 19, 2026, in Kilamba, some 30 kilometers south of Luanda, Angola, on the seventh day of an 11-day apostolic journey to Africa. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)