Penguins 5, Senators 2: Penguins Stick It To JUDAS Gonchar

Has a player ever left the Penguins on more amicable terms than Sergei Gonchar? He and the Penguins mutually agreed to part ways after five productive seasons and a Stanley Cup, then he signed with a conference nonrival for an excellent salary, and the Penguins welcomed him back with a highlight reel at Consol, a standing ovation from the fans, and Penguin players tapping their sticks on their boards. I was half expecting Matt Cooke to line Gonchar up for a blind-side hit, then at the last second yell “SURPRISE!” and flip lights on and the rest of the Penguins would all be gathered in the conference room with party hats and a “55″ cake and everyone would hug and Gonchar would give an awkward thirty second speech then they’d eat and slowly disperse back to work.

That didn’t exactly happen. What did happen, though, was a third straight Penguins victory, keyed off a 3-0 Penguin lead after a wide-open First Period. The Pens managed 17 shots in the First and allowed 12, but still emerged up three goals after a slick Mike Comrie feed to Mark Letestu for his team-leading fourth goal, a bubble hockey-esque bounce off the end boards that Crosby hand-eye-coordinated behind Brian Elliot, and a faceoff that Ottawa cleanly won in their own defensive zone that they couldn’t corral, ended up on net, and was knocked in on the rebound by a fully outstretched diving Malkin.

Sergei Gonchar Signs With Ottawa For Too Much Money, As Expected

Ottawa has signed Sergei Gonchar to a 3-year, $5.5 mil/year deal. Apparently, Ottawa has not seen this clip.

I’ve been up and down on Gonchar throughout his career, but this was obviously the right move for the Pens to let him go. He took a lot of flak his first year with the Pens for his poor play, and rightfully so, but his two-way play in the subsequent seasons after that led me to believe in retrospect that the Penguins were probably just a total mess that first year and it wasn’t Gonchar’s fault, when they randomly signed Gonchar, Ziggy Palffy, John LeClair and Jocelyn Thibault and threw them with Lemieux, Mark Recchi, and 18-year-old Crosby and asked Ed Olczyk — in his second year of coaching ever, at any level — to make it work somehow.

Gonchar regained his form as a top offensive defenseman in the league very quickly after that, but this past season — and perhaps not-coincidentally, ever since getting kneed by Ovechkin in the ’09 Playoffs — he’s proven to be a defensive liability slightly more often than is acceptable for a 24-minutes-a-game #1 defenseman, and while his offensive skill remains sharp as ever, and as pathetically as the Pens’ power play operated when he was out of the lineup last year, the Penguins cannot commit a three-year top-flight salary to a 36-year-old who’s already showed noticeable signs of decline.

Kris Letang and Alex Goligoski have a long way to go both offensively and defensively (people forget Letang scored precisely three goals last season, same as Mark Eaton), and handing the power play reigns over to them will be risky for a while, but not as risky as committing that much cap space to an aging player and ensuring that three of the Pens’ six defensemen possess limited defensive abilities.

Again, I’m sad to see Gonchar go, but I’m frankly surprised the Pens’ negotiations with Gonchar even lasted as long as they did, as the writing appeared to be on the wall for some time. I will miss his offensive contributions as badly as I’ll miss screaming his name sandwiched between two F-words.

GAME SIX: Canadiens 4, Penguins 3 – Pens Keep Dream Of Horribly Choking Alive

Well, this isn’t good. Four games into this series, it still seemed inconceivable that the Pens would lose the best of seven, as they clearly outplayed and outchanced Montreal in almost every one of the first 12 periods of the series aside from the first 10 minutes of Game Three and the third period of Game Four, and even though the Capitals similarly outchanced the Canadiens in their series and came up short, any just law of averages would dictate that a team couldn’t get badly outplayed 14 games in a row and win eight of them.

Games Five and Six, on the contrary, have basically been even hockey games, with the Canadiens even outshooting the Pens in Game Five and Pittsburgh needing a dominant Fleury performance to sneak away with a win in regulation, and not surprisingly, the Canadiens won Game Six and came darn close in Game Five, making Game Seven look like a lot more of a toss-up than one might have expected one week ago.

I’m worried about Fleury again, and not because he played terribly in Game Six (he didn’t), but precisely because he didn’t play terribly — he’s shown a remarkable ability to bounce back from terrible performances with stellar performances, but what about when he plays totally mediocrely, as he did in Game Six? He wasn’t floundering, and didn’t give up a harmless dump-in shot from the left circle, but he also didn’t play “well”, allowing 4 goals on only 25 shots, including two shots from just inside the blue line (albeit on a one-timer and a serious screen, respectively). Will that hamper his ability to have a miraculous bounce-back game to allow haughty sportswriters to rip on us poor mongoloid fans for pointing out when Fleury plays badly?

The Pens’ D often shoulders some of the blame for Fleury’s weaker outings, but in Game Six, they were exceptionally responsible, with Kris Letang setting the tone early by turning the puck over just outside the Pens’ blue line and immediately falling down to give Montreal a clean 2-on-1 and an early lead. The Canadiens’ fourth goal was just a jamboree of failure on the Penguins’ part, and in between, the Pens’ D turned the puck over far too often, played far too tentatively with the puck, and despite Letang’s power play goal and Gonchar’s late tipped-in slapper to cut the lead to one, the defense corps was far too shaky in both zones to loosen the Canadiens up from their “All five dudes collapse to the net at all times” defensive strategy, which will continue to work as long as Goligoski, Leopold, Eaton, and Orpik (and more often than not Gonchar and Letang too) can’t hit the net or have their shots not extremely blocked.

I also wouldn’t be completely surprised if when the Pens’ season ends, they reveal that Crosby was playing with an injury. He really just doesn’t look like himself, and it’s not like he’s flying around playing awesomely and the Canadiens defenders keep perfectly checking him off the puck or diving to deflect his passes (though I give credit to Hal Gill for his impressive Crosby-holding highlight reel that Versus runs every game to compliment his defense), but Crosby’s been less impactful than usual for a far longer stretch than we’re used to seeing. I realize things tighten up in the playoffs and it’s tougher for individuals to dominate, but no matter how well the Canadiens’ D is playing, Sidney Crosby just doesn’t go six game stretches with only one tip-in goal. I’d like to confidently exclaim “Oh he’ll be fine,” but my thoughtless, general optimism heading into this series has given way to cold indifference, as every stretch of every period continues to fall more and more squarely into the toss-up category.

Home ice doesn’t impact Game Seven in any way, either, as much as people who confuse the NHL with the NBA continue falsely believing it does. While it’ll be nice to get the Pens away from the whiny boo factory that is the Bell Centre, they also played their worst game of the series at home in Game 5, and played terribly against Ottawa at home in Game 1 of that series then failed to close out a beaten-down Senators team at home in Game 5, so I’m not drawing any false confidence from the location of this contest. The suckiness of the Pens’ D and Fleury’s proneness to astonishing letdowns cannot be constrained by geography.

So like I said, Game Seven is a toss-up. The Penguins should win if Crosby plays well and Malkin plays well and Fleury plays well and the third line chips in a goal and the penalty killing stops being stupid and the power play continues miraculously being not stupid. But am I confident more than two of those things will happen at the same time in this bewildering series? No, I’m not. If I had to bet, I’d take the Pens, but I’m sitting about 53-47 on this one, and in a one-game winner-takes-all scenario, that’s not a good thing.

Penguins Vs. Canadiens: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Confident

I find every reason to be worried about the Penguins at all times. This prevailing mindset exists in all fans of all sports teams, regardless of the quality or recent performance of that team, for two main reasons:

1) As a devoted fan to a particular team, one is uniquely privy to that team’s subtle weaknesses.

Commentators and casual Penguin-watchers might remark that Marc-Andre Fleury is one of the best clutch goaltenders in the NHL, or that the Pens are loaded with offensive firepower on the blue line with Gonchar, Letang and Goligoski, and they wouldn’t be wrong. People who watch and root for the Penguins on a nightly basis, however, know that Fleury is capable of going into “Fleury…what??” mode and letting in unscreened wrist shots from any concessions stand on any given night, and that Gonchar, Letang and Goligoski all occasionally forget how to play the sport of hockey and become unable to stand in front of other human beings while in their defensive zone. These concerns aren’t extreme pessimism on the part of fans; they’re legitimate aspects that we notice and worry about because we’ve seen them happen hundreds of times.

2) Fans are always reserved about praising their own teams too highly for fear of jinxing them by celebrating prematurely.

Part of this is in a joking, supernatural “don’t want to jinx them!” kind of way, which people don’t actually believe (but dammit, we’re not deviating from it in the playoffs), but on a more practical level, fans also don’t want to appear overconfident and gloat and then have their team ultimately lose, which would make the situation far less digestible on all levels. By curbing our expectations in advance, we give ourselves an emotional safety net if our team loses, rather than the devastating free-fall we’d experience if we were positive the team was going to win and they didn’t.

Both of these reasons are completely legitimate and almost completely universal — you want to scream at Yankee fans when they get nervous when Mariano Rivera comes into the 9th inning of a game when the team’s up 3-1 in the playoff series, but that’s just what fans do. Who wants to be confident and rational about their own team? Douchebags, that’s who. Also rational people, I guess. No, only douchebags. There – proved it!

My point is, I am very much one of these always-worried people. I am extremely one of these people. And yet, having explained in depth all of this jargon about all fans making themselves worried at all times, I am extremely, almost dangerously confident about the Penguins heading into the Montreal series, and here’s why:

Penguins Reward Letang’s Drop In Play With 4-Year, $14 Mil Extension

The Penguins today announced a 4-year extension for RFA-to-be Kris Letang worth $3.5 million per season.

In a semi-related story, this song was blasting on the loudspeaker at Southpointe while Sergei Gonchar was taking his rehab skate:

$3.5 mil isn’t cheap for a guy who’s noticeably played worse this season than last, a drop-off not quite as dramatic as Ryan Whitney’s a year ago but still concerning, and even though Letang is a right-handed offensive defenseman and still 22, he’s only scored 3 goals in 67 games this year despite ample power play time. He also would’ve been a restricted free agent at the end of this season, so teams wouldn’t have been able to sign him without giving up draft picks to the Pens, and I can’t imagine someone would’ve been falling over themselves to throw away first round picks to outbid the Pens for a 5’11″ defenseman after a down year. Well, besides Kevin Lowe.

Still, the Letang contract was necessary, if perhaps a tad expensive. (Continued After The Jump):

Capitals 6, Penguins 3: Predictabull

I rarely get strong inclinations one way or the other before a Pens game about how it’s gonna turn out, but with the way the Pens’ D has been playing and with Brent Johnson in net against a red-hot Capitals offense, the outcome of this game was painfully foreseeable. I predicted 5-2 Capitals, and was actually surprised by the briefly-competitive 6-3 result.

The Pens’ D has been chuck-the-remote bad for a couple months now and continues to trivialize the Pens’ problems on the power play, in net, and Malkin’s mediocrity (all of which have at least shown signs of possible nearby improvement). If the Pens continue playing defense the way they have been, none of these other shortcomings will matter — the Pens will continue to be a glorified Lightning, incapable of stringing together a dominant win streak and entering the playoffs as eminently vulnerable. Fortunately, I don’t think this will be the case leading up to the playoffs, but for now, it’s a painful, me-swearing-at-the-screen reality.

I’ve been a Kris Letang supporter since long before the Ryan Whitney trade, but lately, Letang’s been my go-to Penguins scapegoat; he’s been directly responsible for about a goal a game over the past month, and not just as a result of him being out of position or failing to cover someone, but in increasingly creative, pathetic ways. Against the Capitals last night, Letang got caught pinching in the Caps’ zone below the goal line while it was 5-on-5 and a tie game, lost the puck, and left Nick Johnson — a winger playing in his first ever NHL game — back on D to cover Tomas Fleischmann, resulting in an instant Fleischmann breakaway and goal. Since any further comment on this action would result in at least a dozen F-words from me, I’ll just end the paragraph now.

Wild 4, Penguins 3: Who Loves The Funk?

Not much question where the Pens are right now:

Last night’s pathetic 4-3 loss to Minnesota featured all the wonderful recurring themes of the Pens’ current extended slump / sucking (henceforth to be referred to as “suckmp”):

– Another crap goal let in by Fleury.

– Malkin continues to be distressingly mediocre night in and night out. Even though he still creates consistent impossible turnovers, he currently has 13 goals on the season, tying him for 58th in the NHL with marquee names like Rich Peverley, Matt Duchene, and Raffi Torres. If you woke up Jodie Foster’s Nell at four in the morning and asked her what’s wrong with the Penguins, even though she has no concept of hockey, society, or the English language, she’d be like “Obviously Malkin has to play better. Chickapaaayyy!!!”

– There are no more words in the English language to describe the Pens’ power play. It literally defies description. So I’ll make some words up. The Penguins power play right now is fucking bleexnorff.

It’s Official: Alex Ovechkin Is A Pathological Kneer

Remember the Eastern Conference Semifinals last year when Alexander Ovechkin kneed Sergei Gonchar, got a two-minute tripping penalty even though Gonchar was injured, missed two games and never appeared 100% the rest of the Playoffs, and nearly every announcer — Pittsburgh and Washington alike, and even the highly biased author of this blog — argued that Ovechkin probably had the hit lined up, stuck his leg out as a last-second thoughtless reaction, and had no intention of actually kneeing Gonchar and injuring him?

Guess what? We were wrong. Turns out, Ovechkin actually is a big fan of the knee-to-knee hit, and he pulled off another stellar one last night on Carolina’s Tim Gleason, earning himself a 5-minute major penalty and his SECOND game misconduct in three games, and karmically injuring himself in the process:

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s three suspension-worthy hits by Ovechkin in a span of less than 30 games, going back to last year’s playoffs. It’s now not even debatable anymore: Alex Ovechkin is, by any possible definition, a deliberate cheap-shot artist. We all knew his reputation for taking wild charges at defensemen after they dish outlet passes and are off-balance so they fall down and announcers talk about how hard he plays, but those can at least usually be defended as message-sending collisions, if irrelevant to the play, and the actual hits themselves usually aren’t illegal (because the NHL stopped calling Charging some 12 years ago).

Senators 6, Penguins 2: Were Fleury And The Power Play Also Injured?

The Pens got killed last night, but what were we to expect? The whole team’s injured. Oh wait, Malkin, Gonchar, Talbot, and Eaton all ended up playing? Oh. So they just sucked. Alright, I can accept that.

The Pens got outplayed last night from the millisecond after Jordan Staal poked in a Pascal Dupuis feed to make it 1-0 up until the final buzzer. They somehow only got outshot 31-27, but it felt a lot worse, their powerplay was painfully bad (they finished 1 for 5 but the 1 was in the last couple minutes when they were already down 6-1), Fleury played his worst game of the season, allowing several goals from angles that protractors aren’t capable of measuring, and the team carried a general lack of urgency that doomed them from the moment they fell behind 2-1.

Also, complaining about the Penguins (or any team) not shooting the puck enough is hockey’s Kneejerk Fan 101, but the Penguins reeeeally didn’t want to shoot the puck last night (except Dupuis, and if he’s the only one firing the puck, you are the worst team in the NHL). The telltale sign that the Pens aren’t shooting the puck, usually, is when they have a game where Crosby, Malkin, Staal, and Gonchar all keep trying to thread passes to other players in worse shooting positions than themselves, and this kept happening again and again; it’s bad enough that the people Malkin passes to will be, by definition, crappier finishers than him, but it’s even worse when it’s a risky pass and it’s to a dude who isn’t even in a better position to score than the person passing. Hopefully, the scoreboard at the end of the night will be enough of a cartoony slap across the faces of the Pens’ stars to wake them back up for Saturday night.

Other thoughts:

– Daniel Alfredsson looked as good last night as I’ve seen him in the last three seasons. He’s always been right on that fence between “Consistently Good Player” and “Superstar,” but last night he played like the latter.

– The Senators fans loudly booed every single penalty call against the team. Christ, Ottawa, you can relax — you’re not frickin’ Montreal, you’re allowed to derive pleasure from live hockey events.

– If there’s one positive to take out of the Senators game, at least the Penguins never traded anyone for Jonathan Cheechoo. Man, that dude has nothing left — he’s fallen all the way to the status of “Random Roleplayer Who Breaks Scoreless Drought Against Penguins.” Yeesh.

– In fairness to the Pens, they were at the end of a long road trip. Meaning, the trip from Pittsburgh to Ottawa.

Place Your Bets: Who’s Getting Injured In The Pens Game Tonight?

Maxime Talbot and Sergei Gonchar are both scheduled to return for the Pens against Ottawa tonight, which can only mean one thing: Someone else is getting injured in tonight’s game. The only question is, who?

I feel like a Crosby or Fleury injury would be too on-the-nose for this season, so I don’t think Pen-karma will go quite that far, and Eaton going down to complete the cycle of injured opening night defensemen would be the easy choice, so I’m not gonna go there either.  I’m predicting it’ll be a more minor player, but with a more major injury than we’ve seen so far, just to keep things interesting / annoying.

My prediction: I’m putting $50 on Craig Adams going out 4-6 months with a lower body injury.

My friend Doug bets on a Talbot re-injury in the middle of the game tonight, which isn’t a bad prediction either — you can practically already hear Bob Errey saying “We haven’t seen Max Talbot since he went down the runway in the middle of the second period, no word on his condition yet, hopefully it’s not anything serious…”

Anyone else want to throw an injury prediction on the record? Feel free to leave ‘em in the comments.

UPDATE: Mark Eaton is “questionable” tonight. Why wouldn’t he be?