Pens Win In Double Overtime, Take 3-1 Series Lead, And Tampa Should Be Embarrassed

While trying to wrap my head around the first four-game chunk of this hopefully nearly-over first round playoff series, my thought process has gone something like this:

Well, the Pens are dominating 5-on-5, they just need to limit Tampa’s power play chances and hopefully grab a power play goal of their own, and they shou–

Wait.

The gravity of the first half of that sentence shouldn’t get minimized by the details of the second half. It is EMBARRASSING how badly the Penguins have outplayed Tampa 5-on-5 in this series, with the exception of the first periods in Game One and Game Two. But whether we split hairs and argue that the Pens have dominated about 70% of the 5-on-5 play in this series or if it’s closer to 55-60%, the fact that we’re talking about this Penguins team dominating this Tampa team 5-on-5 for the majority of this series, and readily accepting that fact as though it’s a given, is, I will say again, embarrassing.

Tampa is completely healthy. Ryan Malone is obviously dragging, and Steven Stamkos is very likely dealing with a nagging injury that’ll come out after the playoffs, but they’re still both in the lineup. This is the #5 seed in the Eastern Conference that’s clearly loaded with a Top-5 team in the NHL in terms of top-end offensive talent, and they’re getting noticeably and routinely outplayed by a Penguins squad that’s only one seed higher, missing two of the top players in the NHL, and essentially dressing two #2 lines and two #4 lines.

All the borderline “damning with faint praise” compliments we’ve been showering on the Pens over these past few Crosbyless months — “Tyler Kennedy has really elevated his game!”, “This team is really resilient and showing a lot of character,” “Dan Bylsma is doing his best coaching job yet, keeping these guys playing hard every night” — usually sounded like one big “attaboy” thumbs-up as we justified our own surprise that this team didn’t completely collapse. Honestly though, and perhaps I’m only speaking for myself, I didn’t believe that any of those positives in the Pens’ recent play would truly matter against a more talented, healthier playoff opponent that’s also well coached, strong in goal, and experienced in the playoffs. If the most dangerous thing you can say about a Playoff team is “Tyler Kennedy’s been playing pretty well,” you’re basically saying “Ah well, it’s been a good run.”

The one possible tipping point, as I said in my series prediction, was Fleury. I thought if Fleury played out of his mind for 4 of 7 games, then the Pens had a shot, but I didn’t foresee that happening — not for lack of faith in Fleury, just for the general unlikelihood of any one player maintaining such routine dominance in a long playoff series. Fleury did indeed play out of his mind in Game One, and the Pens had no business escaping the opening period of that game tied 0-0; however, while Fleury also played excellently in Games 3 and 4, he didn’t have to steal Games 3 or 4, and that’s just not at all how I saw this series playing out. Perhaps my attempt at dispassionate, rational analysis of this series actually just meant that I deliberately underestimated the team I root for and equated that with even analysis, but I honestly don’t think that’s the case.

The Penguins outshot Tampa on their home ice in Game 3, 30-27, and didn’t allow an even-strength goal. They then outshot Tampa on their home ice two nights later, 53-31, in a game that Tampa absolutely needed. The Penguins don’t have Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin — a fact that’s so significant, it’s incredible that we now mention as if it’s a footnote — and they are badly outplaying a super-talented team that’s one seed below them. I’m certainly not complaining, but I certainly didn’t see it happening.

Other Random Thoughts On The Series:

Crosby Will Definitely Return This Season Or Not

BREAKING CROSBY NEWS, you guys! Reporting on the scene are ESPN and the Post-Gazette:

Now we know for sure: Crosby may return this season, or may be out for the year. THANK GOD. All that uncertainty was such a distraction.

Stars 5, Penguins 2: Pens Play Flawlessly. End Of Story.

When Brent Johnson let in a wrister from 40 feet then Brad Richards threw in a second goal after parking himself in the right circle uncovered for an hour and a half both within the first eight minutes of the First Period, I’m pretty sure we all had the same thought running through our heads: This is going to turn out to be the most perfect game the Penguins have ever played. And you know something? We were right.

The Penguins were completely flawless against Dallas in every conceivable way, and were extremely entertaining to watch in the process. The defense? Perfect. Johnson? Perfect. Michalek in his return from injury? Perfect and perfectly healthy. The power play? Is there a word more perfect than “perfect”? Like, “doubleplusperfect”? Because that’s how good the power play was.

Sure, the scoreboard at the end of the day said Dallas 5, Pittsburgh 2, and the only life the Pens showed was a string of random fights in the middle of the second including Sidney Crosby getting into the action, Kris Letang dropping his gloves, remembering his hand is injured, and pathetically clinging to Brenden Morrow, and Mike Comrie making himself useful and sticking up for his teammates by punching the puck. Shockingly, none of these actions sparked a four-goal comeback.

Hopefully the Pens can continue this flawless play in Anaheim on Friday night. The way the power play has been looking lately, in addition to the defense and the incredibly indistinguishable play of Comrie, Mike Rupp, Max Talbot, and Chris Kunitz, I’m moderately confident that they can keep it up.

2 Quick Sidenotes, after the jump:

Lightning 5, Penguins 3: When You Play Tampa, You Just Have To Contain Teddy Purcell

My brother, a hockey fan who despises the NBA even more strongly than I do, has long made the argument that part of the NHL’s struggle for publicity stems from how fundamentally different the roles of its stars are from those of the stars in the NBA. If you attend a Lakers game, you know almost unequivocally that Kobe Bryant is going to score 20 points with a shot at 30 or 40, and he’ll have the ball in his hands on nearly every possession throughout the entire game, whereas if you attend a Penguins game — such as the Pens’ unimpressive 5-3 clunker in Tampa Wednesday night — you very plausibly might see Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin manage just one secondary assist between them.

The disparity in star power between NHL players and NBA players isn’t solely a factor of the sports’ differing popularities or the way that they’re promoted, but also results from this primary, fundamental difference within the sports themselves. If you’ve never seen a basketball game, you’re still not going to watch a Heat game without noticing LeBron James; if you’re not a serious hockey fan, though, you very well could’ve missed Sidney Crosby Wednesday night.

I’ll save the finer points of this argument for another day, but it’s a nice, general, roundabout segue into my minorly disgusted reaction to the Pens’ loss to Tampa, in which Sidney Crosby played possibly his worst game of the year, managing 3 shots and a Minus-1, providing absolutely zip on the power play, and turning the puck over with Cutleresque frequency. The Pens managed to lose a game in which they scored two shorthanded goals on the same Tampa power play, got goals from Matt Cooke, Pascal Dupuis, and Craig Adams, and managed to chase the clueless-looking Mike Smith just 12 minutes into the game.

Fleury did his part too, allowing 4 goals on 30 shots (.867 SV%) including the first shot of the game for his second straight start, this time on a harmless wrister along the ice from Tampa’s most dangerous sniper, Dana Tyrell. The equally unstoppable Teddy Purcell added a goal on an untipped wrist shot from above the circles (the Pens had a tough time containing the notorious -Ell Twins), Vinny LeCavalier threw an unstoppable power play one-timer past Fleury to tie it, and Marty St. Louis forced a breakaway through two Penguin defenders and chipped the winning goal over a failed Fleury poke-check. Stir in another sweet 0-for-5 on the Pens’ power play and voila! A regulation loss after being up 3-1.

Jordan Staal is allegedly slated to return Friday against Philly. If his weight still isn’t up to par, he has my permission to eat Mike Comrie.

Penguins 4, Predators 3 (OT): Sidney Crosby Is Good At The Sport Of Hockey. Yeah, I Said It.

That’s what Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin look like when they’re on top of their game. The Predators game was, I mean, not that embed. That embed is what Pascal Dupuis looks like on an odd man rush.

As much as we love to dissect Letang’s inopportune pinching and Fleury’s psyche and the forwards’ defensive zone faceoff coverage and whatever other details linger whenever Crosby and Malkin aren’t ridiculous and the Penguins lose a game by a goal and the lingering emptiness prohibits us from just copy-pasting “They have Crosby and Malkin, they’ll be fine” and counting it as postgame analysis, in a victory like tonight, that’s precisely what I’ll do. Crosby and Malkin simply willed the Pens to two points tonight.

Fleury played well, and Pascal Dupuis’ stick and Kris Letang’s slapper and some lucky bounces all helped, but this was a game the Penguins would’ve lost if either Crosby or Malkin had dropped a B+. Crosby’s first goal exploited a pretty glaring mistake by Pekka Rinne, who was cheating to his left expecting a pass, and both Malkin’s goal and Crosby’s second goal came off super-fortunate rebounds, but to borrow from my “Sportscaster Cliche” Page-A-Day Calendar, they were both textbook examples of great players creating their own luck. Eric Tangradi goes straight to the net on every single shift, but he still only has one goal; Crosby and Malkin scored tonight by being intuitive, seeing the rebounds before they happened, and fighting to get the right spot. Malkin’s effort on the second Crosby goal was so Hurculean, it made me unselfconscious enough to actually type the adjective “Hurculean”.

Also, before the game I joked to my friend about how much I hated all those damn Predators fans and couldn’t wait for the huge Penguins / Predators rivalry game to shut them up, but then the game actually did end up being really physical and rivalry-seeming, in addition to being extremely entertaining from a skill stand point. With the win, the Pens improve to 5-3-0 overall and 3-0 on the road, and they’re now tied with the Islanders for the most points in the East, even though they’ve played 1-3 more games than every other team (really gotta squeeze in as many games as they can before their three best defensive players come back). Hopefully they can keep it up with only… let me check… 930 games left to play.

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.

Will Sidney Crosby Make The Penguins’ Roster?

I know Crosby’s the go-to interview for everything ever, but is he really the best player to headline an article about the competition for roster spots at Penguins training camp?

Let the battle for jobs begin!!! There’s 12 forwards signed to NHL contracts, Sidney, so you better turn some heads in training camp.

Crosby Wins ESPY For “Best Hockey Player,” Proving Again That Fans Are Smarter Than Hockey Writers

Sidney Crosby may have missed out on the Hart Trophy this year (finishing third in the voting behind Henrik Sedin and Alex Ovechkin), as well as the Lester Pearson Award for MVP as voted on by the players (Ovechkin), but last night he won the ESPY Award for Best NHL Player.

The ESPY award doesn’t specify parameters, so Crosby’s Olympic-winning goal likely swayed some votes, and all three players had comparably unmemorable postseasons, so even if the Crosby verdict was just a byproduct of casual fans voting for the biggest name, the decision by the ESPY voters is a fairly logical one, especially when Crosby deserved the Hart over Sedin to begin with.

I realize this evaluation is borderline conspiracy-theory-ey, especially coming from a blogger with a Pens logo in his banner, but I still believe that North American hockey writers were influenced by the opportunity to promote someone other than Crosby or Ovechkin for a change and leapt at the chance to vote for Sedin knowing it would benefit the league as a whole from a promotional standpoint, especially after Ryan Miller’s Olympic run was such a captivating event .

At this juncture, I would like to post my monthly “hockey writers are stupid” reminder that Jaromir Jagr won 5 scoring titles and only 1 Hart Trophy in his career, and that doesn’t include the year he finished 2 points behind Joe Thornton but scored 25 more goals and Thornton still got the MVP. I’ve said multiple times that complaining about MVP voting is the most useless endeavor in sports besides complaining about All-Star selections, and yet I get pulled into it again and again every year. It’s like heroin, without the upside.

Sidney Crosby Loses Hart Trophy To Guy Who Scored Twenty-Two Fewer Goals

Complaining about season-end trophies is the second most pointless waste of breath in sports behind complaining about All-Star selections, so I’ll keep this short:

Henrik Sedin won the Hart Trophy over Sidney Crosby.

Henrik Sedin scored 29 goals this season, Sidney Crosby scored 51.

Henrik Sedin finished with 112 points, Sidney Crosby finished with 109.

Henrik Sedin plays on a line with his identical twin Daniel, who’s averaged over 30 goals per season over the last four years. Sidney Crosby plays on a line with Bill Guerin, who is 39, and Chris Kuntiz, who missed 32 games and finished the season with 13 goals, neither of whom is Crosby’s identical twin.

Vancouver finished the ’08-’09 season with 100 points (3rd place in the West) when Sedin was not the MVP, and 103 points this season (3rd place in the West) when Sedin was the MVP. The Penguins finished the ’08-’09 season with 99 points (4th place in the East) when Crosby was not the MVP, and 101 points this season (4th place in the East) when Crosby was also not the MVP.

Daniel Sedin, Vancouver’s second-best forward, missed 19 games this season. Evgeni Malkin, Pittsburgh’s second-best forward, missed 15 games this season.

Which of the above statistics jumps out the most? The fact that Vancouver finished slightly higher than Pittsburgh in a tougher conference, on a team which also has arguably the best goalie in the NHL? Or the fact that Sidney Crosby scored twenty-two more goals than Henrik Sedin while playing on a much worse line?

I’m guessing that the hockey media isn’t blind to the fact that promoting someone other than Crosby and Ovechkin for a change — as NBC found out during the Olympics with Ryan Miller — helps the sport grow as a whole, and thus benefits everyone. I only say this because, if you didn’t notice, Sidney Crosby had a better individual season than Sedin and was far, far more valuable to his team, and did not win the NHL’s MVP Award.

Like I said, second biggest waste of breath in sports.

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.