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B's chance of winning the cup

Tom Awad over at the newly-launched Puck Prospectus wrote an interesting article giving his Power Rankings for each team in the NHL.  Included was his projected chance for each team of both making the playoffs and winning the Cup.

Here's a link to the article:
http://www.puckprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=21

As you can see, the B's have a 24% chance of winning the whole thing, according to these rankings.

Given there are 4 rounds of the playoffs and many of the teams are reasonably strong, I found this number to be high.  By a quick calculation, that would mean the Bruins had a 70% chance of winning each round!  So I e-mailed Tom to ask about his methodology.  Here was the relevant portion of his response:

As for the "Chance to win the Cup", it's a Monte Carlo
simulation, as you correctly guessed. I agree, 24%
for Boston sounds a bit high intuitively, but it comes
mostly from playing in a weak conference. Specifically,
the odds for the Bruins to win each round were:

79.0% 74.9% 69.9% 58.9%


So, according to this, the Bruins are the overwhelming favorites to beat the #8 seed (Buffalo / Carolina / Pittsburgh / NYR) and win the next round as well (re-seeding probably helps in this prediction).  Now, I'm more of a baseball fan than a hockey fan, but I know that statistics have shown in baseball that the odds in a short series are rarely that much in favor of one team regardless of their respective ability. 

Now I'm not picking on Tom at all, as this is a very worthy topic of discussion, but I think his odds are too high.  Here are my questions for you:

-Is there something inherent in hockey that would make a top team that much more likely to win a 7-game series than in baseball (even against a #20 or so-ranked team)?
-Where would you put the B's chance at winning the Cup?  Reaching the Final?
-By how much did they help themselves with the recent additions?

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