Lightning Crashes. Pens Win.

Really? Nobody has used this yet? For shame, Pittsburgh bloggers.


Playoff hockey is awesome. Like finding a $20 on the street awesome. We've talked so much about the Penguins without Crosby and Malkin that we forgot that we have a buttload of players with a buttload of Stanley Cup experience. That really showed tonight.

Before anyone could finish their pregame dump, Brooks Orpik tried to murder Steven Stamkos. Somehow the Lightning ended up with more hits in that game than the Pens did. I can only assume whoever came up with that stat was watching American Idol.

It was pretty much goalie central during the first two periods, but then in the third, a set of game changing events took shape.

1. James Neal put about 50,000 shots on the net.

2. Kovalev gets pasted in front of the net, then proceeds to take a nap for a while. He's old. Whatever.

3. James Neal anticipates, and finds the puck. This was a pretty pervasive theme during the game.

4. Kovalev wakes up to the sound of a beautiful slap pass at his door, and proceeds to shuffle it in.

There's some sort of cosmic injustice in that play. James Neal has a ridiculous shift, but the goal goes to Kovy, who was pouting near the crease after being hit. Sorry, but he just doesn't look like a Penguin to me. Seems to have very little fire.

Pretty much like 4 seconds after Kovalev's goal, Arron Asham apparently spots Jessica Alba standing behind Dwayne Roloson, so he blitzes down the ice, fakes a shot and buries his second attempt of a wrap-around. I'm not sure where the hell that came from, but Asham did score 7 playoff goals last year. This is one of the reasons Shero nabbed him in the offseason. As close to a life changing goal as you can get in the first game of the playoffs.


Had to post this video just because it's called "Asham Scores a Very Special Goal". What the hell? When did Sesame Street start posting Pens videos on Youtube?

Anyhow, to their credit, the Lightning buckled down and started amping up their game. Big time. You braced yourself for them to put one by Fleury, but it just never happened. St. Louis had an open net at one point, but he crapped himself and shot it over the cage.

With about three minutes left in the final frame, there was a moment that perfectly encapsulated the Pens season (at least the second half). Kunitz fights to keep the puck in the zone, corrals it and rifles a one-time opportunity over to a wide open Jordan Staal, who proceeds to completely whiff on the shot. This isn't a knock on Staal, he had a great game and was instrumental in shutting down Tampa's big three. But therein lies the Crosby difference. If he were in there and healthy, that's Crosby skating alone down the seam, and sorry, but Crosby doesn't miss that shot. The Pens go up 3-0 with a couple minutes left, and the Lightning can just phone it in from there. But that's not the way this team is going to win games. There won't be many three goal leads. They'll just be sixty minute brawls.

And you know, that's just fine with me.


Game notes:

- James Neal got absolutely robbed out of one of the three stars. I can somewhat understand Staal, but Kovy? Insane.

- Fleury continues to impress. Sooner or later, we're just going to run out of adjectives that can adequately describe the season he's having.

- Ryan Malone is going to be annoying all series long.

- The fourth line wreaked havoc. They only logged like 8 or 9 minutes of ice time, but they were incredibly productive minutes. Things like that make a huge difference in the playoffs.


And oh yeah, Craig Adams' Mohawk moves to 5-0 on the season. What a hairstyle.

Game of the Year

When you don't play your rival for 3 months, it's easy to forget how much you hate them. That's how I felt going into last week's Pens-Flyers matchup. It took about 0.2 seconds for me to remember the depth of my loathing for the Philadelphia Flyers. In my hate scale, the Flyers rank somewhere between ex-girlfriends and Glenn Beck.



It's a scary thing when a former drug addicted alcoholic high-school grad is one of the most powerful men in America. He'd probably say hockey is a tool of the Communists used to put Marxist thought into the minds of the impressionable masses.

Anyway, I digress.

The Flyers will likely be without defenseman Chris Pronger. But Pronger is overrated anyways, so who gives a crap. Side note: I once had a Flyers fan try to argue that Chris Pronger was as good a defenseman as Nicklas Lidstrom. No joke.

Rumors are abound that Crosby is close to making a return to practice. I'm not sure we even need him to be a contender. Though it definitely wouldn't hurt.

There was one thing that I wanted to address. The Marc-Andre Fleury for MVP talk.



I should preface this by saying that I absolutely love Fleury. There's no one else that I'd rather have manning the net for my beloved Pens. His puck handling and rebound control have improved by leaps and bounds this year. And anyone who says that he's not a clutch goalie must not watch Pens games. There is no doubt that he's the team MVP this year (which he was voted as by the team).

But should he win the Hart? Probably not.

First off, the last goalie to win the Hart was Jose Theodore in 01-02. Theodore lead the league in save percentage that year, and was fourth in goals against average. Fleury doesn't rank in the top 5 in either of those categories (8th and 11th, respectively). In the entire history of the award, it has only been won by a goaltender 7 times, and only three times since 1962. So in essence, in order to win the Hart as a goaltender, you have to be SIGNIFICANTLY better than any other netminder in the league. This year, one could easily make a legitimate case for Roberto Luongo, Tim Thomas, Pekka Rinne and Henrik Lundqvist (who has nearly four times as many shutouts as Fleury) for MVP as well.

Like I've said, I'm not discounting Fleury's importance to this team. Without him, we're probably struggling for a playoff spot. But if you take guys like Luongo and Lundqvist off their teams, they're in the same position as well. To me, this season has firmly entrenched Fleury as an elite NHL goaltender. But hopes of a Hart are probably unrealistic.

But I must say, if by some infinitesimal chance, Fleury does win; I will gladly eat my words.

He should at least get save of the year for this. Pretty much took whatever was left of Mike Green's manhood (riding a Vespa and having a flower tattoo eliminates 85% of his man cards) on this stop. Awesome stuff. Gotta love Green's reaction. It looks like he got shot.



Let's go Pens.