Game Three Recap (Penguins 5, Rangers 3)

Here's one way to tell things are going well: you've got a high-scoring line, but one of the wings has been sent off for a minor penalty. To take his place you send out a guy who scored 4 goals in 71 games this past year. He takes a feed in front of the net and buries it.

And then there's this: fishing for a column idea, Ron Cook of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette suggests in yesterday's paper that Marian Hossa isn't scoring enough and that he ought to be taken off the top power play. Never mind that he's been getting a bunch of chances, that he's been putting those chances on the net and that Henrik Lundquist has made some pretty spectacular saves against Hossa in particular. So it's not as if he isn't generating scoring chances. And never mind that Hossa's 2 goals in 6 games before last night is only a hair behind a 30 goal pace over a regular season. Unless the team's NY hotel delivered the Post-Gazette to the players' rooms, Hossa was unaware of the column when he was in perfect position to bury a rebound a minute into the game. Sure, we'd all love to see Hossa have a multi-goal game in these playoffs, but not everybody can be Evgeni Malkin.

It's only three games, et cetera, et cetera. Still, in the postgame interview aired on the NHL Network, Jaromir Jagr looked defeated and resigned. He'd left everything on the ice, and if anybody on the Rangers had brought as much to the table as he and Marty Straka brought, the game would have swung the other way. Jagr was his old self again. He was the guy who single-handedly put out the Devils in 2000 and the Capitals on four or five occasions. The stats sheet says he logged 21:45 of ice time, but that seems woefully low. In front of his locker after the game he talked about how coming back from a 3-0 deficit was possible, then mumbled something about how if Thursday was going to be his last game, he'd try to make it special.

Game Two Recap (Penguins 2, Rangers 0)

Yeah, that was more like it.

The teams relearned how to play defense in the day between games one and two. Plus, the rest day gave the Rangers an opportunity to loudly beat the drum that Sidney Crosby is a chronic diver enabled by inept officials. That makes a nice side dish to the moronic conspiracy theory that the NHL is trying to preordain Crosby's presence in the Stanley Cup Finals. Oh, yeah. Crosby's such a national draw that I'm sure his presence would draw more eyeballs than having the team from North America's largest media market in the championship round.

But what's strange is how Jaromir Jagr is the chief prosecutor in the diving charges. It's as if he forgot all those years he spent with the Penguins fighting through hooks and holds and drawing only a fraction of the penalties that were committed against him. Does Jagr seriously maintain that he never made it visibly clear that he was being fouled in order to get a call? His mentor Mario Lemieux sure did. In fact, there's a fearful symmetry at work here. Before they roared back to beat the Rangers in Game One, the last time the Penguins overcame a three-goal deficit in the playoffs was Game One of the 1992 Finals, which appeared headed for overtime until right before the period ended and a penalty was drawn by Mario Lemieux, leading to a goal by Lemieux and the beginning of a four-game sweep. Mike Keenan accused Lemieux of diving ("I can't respect Mario for diving," Keenan said. "The best player in the game is embarrassing himself and embarrassing the game."). When teams are losing and unable to keep up with another team's skill player or players, diving accusations are a predictable way to try to curry favor from officials. I just never imagined it would be Jagr who would level the charge, but then again I never imagined he'd be playing out the string on a team that plays a modified neutral-zone trap, either. Kevin Constantine would be proud of you, pal.

Even though Jagr got some shots on net in Game Two, he was far less fearsome lugging the puck with no room on the ice. It probably helps that Jordan Staal has been shadowing Jagr. It's clear at this point that nobody is going to believe that the Penguins are a really good defensive team until or unless they win the Cup, despite all evidence to the contrary. And it's clear that Marc-Andre Fleury is still going to be considered untested and unproven no matter how low his GAA is or how high his save percentage is. But that's OK. On Sunday, Sean Avery got an end-of-game reminder that Fleury is ready for his close-up. He gave Martin Lapointe the same how-do-you-do in the Conference Quarterfinals, and I couldn't be happier to see him taking on a bit of an edge.

Still, it's only two games.

Game One Recap (Penguins 5, Rangers 4)

We'll know by Sunday or Tuesday whether last night's game was an aberration brought about by two teams playing after seven and nine days off. There were more defensive breakdowns tonight than I'd expect to see from either team. Plus, there were at least three truly fluky goals-- one goal by each team that deflected off an opponent defenseman and into the net and the Rangers' second goal, a deflected high shot which rolled like a ground ball into the Penguins' net while Marc-Andre Fleury was still catching air from an ill-advised attempt at a jump save. It was the first time he looked bad all postseason, and for that moment to come in the eighteenth period of postseason play, when it came in the first minute of postseasonplay last year tells you all you need to know about this team's maturity. And in the catalogue of fluky goals I haven't even mentioned Marian Hossa's seeing-eye goal which went through the opening between the two pieces that connect a Ranger's skate to his boot. I have never seen that before.

The Penguins never seemed able to get into a rhythm with rolling lines; there seemed to be large stretches during the game where Max Talbot wasn't in the building. I doubt the Rangers can score four goals many more times in a seven-game series, but I don't doubt that the Penguins might score a pair of goals in fourteen seconds and another pair in twenty seconds, as they did in Game One.

In the end, though, this series is all about Jaromir Jagr. Each of the times he screamed down the left wing lugging the puck I held my breath. Now I know how the other guys' fans felt all those years. This playoff year is the Penguins' attempt to build a post-Lemieux (as player), post-Jagr juggernaut, and in true hero's journey fashion you've got to kill the king before you can take his throne. Jagr's always been one of my favorite athletes. I'm on record as being against the practice of booing him, but the guy is absolutely inscrutable. He found a way to mope his way out of a city that idolized him, and it never really made any sense. The Tribune-Review reprinted a 2001 article which tried to sort out what was making him miserable. Just Friday, Jagr revised history by suggesting he was trying to save the headed-for-financial-ruin team some money they could use to keep other great players. Of course, they didn't keep those other players, either.

But more ironically, that quarter-for-two-dimes trade netted the Penguins Kris Beech in return. The guy was going to be "the next Ron Francis." He wasn't. The only youtube clip you'll find of him is some scoreboard-aired goofing during his second tenure with the Capitals calling the skating penguin the ugliest logo in the NHL. Beech is back with the Penguins now, though he's a healthy scratch now who won't get in a game unless the lineup gets hit by a bus or needs a Richter-level shaking-up. Instead, he sits in the press box spitting into a cup and showing off the male pattern baldness that his hockey helmet covers. Still, if the Penguins get past the Rangers and two more opponents, he'll get his name on the Stanley Cup.

Just like Jaromir Jagr.

2008 Stanley Cup Conference Semifinals Picks

(Image courtesy of the pensblog.)

I went 4-4 overall and 2-2 in each conference in Round One. If the Capitals had been able to finish off the Flyers, I'd have gotten the result and the games right. Otherwise, I came close only in picking the Penguins in five.

The playoff field has two teams in the Wales who almost squandered 3-1 leads and a team in the Campbell who nearly blew a 3-2 lead. Those teams won't be winning the Cup.

EASTERN CONFERENCE

FLYERS over CANADIENS in six games

PENGUINS over RANGERS in six games

WESTERN CONFERENCE

AVALANCHE over RED WINGS in seven games

STARS over SHARKS in six games

Game Four Recap (Penguins 3, Senators 1)

Among the great Stanley Cup playoff traditions, the handshake line might be the best. A mere moment after two teams are fighting for their lives, they've got to line up and shake hands with each other. In theory, all those grievances and temporary hatreds melt away in that gesture of sportsmanship. The losers wish the winners luck as they move on. In some other sports there's a sort of amorphous mass of people after the game, and some manner of congratulations going on, but it's haphazard and not at all comprehensive. Not everybody shakes everybody's hand. The Stanley Cup playoffs handshake line, in contrast, is like a leftover from Little League or YMCA league, only you've got to do more than just slap hands with the guys that beat you.

Or at least that's how it usually works. Thanks for screwing it up, Martin Brodeur.

But the Penguins advanced and executed the handshake line without incident. The elimination game was a perfect example of how playoff hockey works. So much deserved press goes to the Penguins' young offensive stars-- Malkin gets a nice little write-up in Sports Illustrated this week-- but the supporting cast makes the indispensable plays. The opening goal is scored by Malkin on the power play off a feed from Crosby, who also ices the game with the empty-netter. The game-winner, though, is scored on a nifty backhander by Jarkko Ruutu...


The Penguins' Stanley Cup teams of '91 and '92 had their own Scandinavian agitator getting the other team off its game. Ruutu is this year's model. Now all he's got to do is match Sean Avery's misery index. Without taking a penalty.

Game Three Recap (Penguins 4, Senators 1)

Sure, it was impressive to sweep the first two games at home against the team that crushed the Penguins in five games last year, but one couldn't be blamed for having some lingering questions for the series. Would the Penguins play with the same intensity on the road in front of a loud, hostile crowd? Would they have the same success with Daniel Alfredsson in the Senators' lineup given the way he's tortured them over the past few years? Would they be able to recover after giving up the first goal in a game?

Check, check and check.

Still, it's only three games.

Bridges

Michael Chabon, writing in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

And there is grace in the fierce survival, down into this time of homogeneity and gentrification, of the Pittsburgh I remember, with its secret language and wildly manifest accent, its hill-and-hollow, mom-and-pop, ethnic crazy-quilt neighborhoods. As much as any other place in the country, Pittsburgh -- Polish, Italian, African, Jewish, Ukrainian, Scots-Irish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian and, more recently, Indian and Chinese, among others -- embodies and, more importantly, preserves, the spirit of "Out of many, one." The neighborhoods are still there, separated from each other by chasms and ridges and rivers; still linked, stitched up, bound together by 446 bridges.

It's in those bridges that the hope and the greatness of Pittsburgh lie. Though they were built to serve the needs of commerce and industry, other fundamental human needs -- for communication, for connection, for free passage through the world -- also drove their construction. As with courage, a beautifully engineered bridge such as Pittsburgh's Smithfield Street Bridge can be defined as grace under pressure, reconciling distances and bearing heavy loads with elegance and steel. Pittsburghers live in their neighborhoods, but they rely on the bridges they have built to teach them how to live together in their city, through a transfer of shared humanity, a mutual reaching toward the opposite shore.

Game Two Recap (Penguins 5, Senators 3)

Halfway through the second period of tonight's game the Penguins were leading the Senators 2-0, had already recorded forty shots on goal and were killing a penalty pretty effectively. As the penalty expired, Malkin dove out on his belly to block a pass in the slot and skittered the puck to Brooks Orpik, who had stepped out of the penalty box and was ready for the obligatory breakaway. Orpik has had an up-and-down season that reached its low point when he was assigned to the gulag of playing left wing, but he's emerged as a guy who has a lot of tangible and valuable skills that will keep him employed for the next several years. Unfortunately, offense isn't one of them, so as he skated in toward Martin Gerber I thought about how Mellon Arena would literally come down if he lit the lamp. Sadly, Gerber closed the five hole and rebuffed him, but on the ensuing play as some hapless Senator was trying to skate the puck out of his end, Ryan Malone stood him up at the blue line with a great check and slid the puck to Malkin, who faked the slap shot and fired a perfect pass to Petr Sykora. Sykora is physically incapable of missing a one-timer set up as pretty as this one was, and the goal, his third in two games, made everybody in the building think the series would likely end up a four-game cakewalk where the Senators might not even score a goal.

We shoulda known better. The Penguins' defensive positioning and backchecking had shut down the Senators' perimeter passing and play-setting, so Ottawa started sending a bunch of guys to the Penguins' net to try to get rebounds off shot/passes. It worked to the tune of a tie game by the ten-minute mark of the third period. Can you imagine the lift it would have given the Senators to have left with a win after being down by three halfway through, after being outshot by twenty-five shots and being held without a goal for the first game-and-a-half? Yeah, I didn't want to imagine it either. Imagine, instead, the demoralizing effect of making such a valiant comeback only to take a dumb and unnecessary penalty with 1:13 left in the third period to give the Penguins a power play. That power play, of course, led to the goal that left Gerber prone on the ice for about ten seconds, as seen above. By game end, the Penguins had a significant disparity in power plays, owing to some untimely indiscipline on the part of Chris Phillips and Martin Lapointe, in particular. I'm sure that disparity will play out in the form of some evening-out in games three and four, but the home team still has its two-game advantage.

My dad scored two tickets to the game as a belated birthday present, and our seats in F balcony were directly above where Ryan Malone swooped around the Ottawa net and stuffed in the winning wraparound. If I'd forgotten a little in the past few years, I was instantly reminded of why I love the NHL in general, and the playoffs in particular. The first playoff game I saw in person was Mario Lemieux's 5-goal, 3-assist whomping of the Flyers back on April 25, 1989, which guaranteed I'll be a Penguins fan until I stop drawing breath. It didn't look like anything could stop them after that game. That ended up being the last game the Penguins won in the '88-'89 playoffs. My second playoff game attended was a 7-2 drubbing the Penguins suffered in April 1992 at the hands of the Washington Capitals. That loss put them down 3-1 in their first-round series and led to them being written off by everybody with an opinion. They won fifteen out of their next seventeen on their way to the Stanley Cup. And every game it's a different hero. That's what I've missed since the team's last prolonged playoff run seven years ago, but it looks like it might be back. Two games, two heroes.

Game One Recap (Penguins 4, Senators 0)

It's just one game. It's just one game. That's the mantra Penguin fans are repeating this morning after last night's perfectly-scripted 4-0 win over Ottawa. And that's the beauty of sports that don't decide things with single games; you never know whether a single game result-- even a lopsided one-- is an anomaly or a microcosm of how the teams stack up. As Bob Johnson used to say, you gotta win four, and you can lose three. But the Game One 6-2 beating the Senators laid on the Penguins last year was representative of the disparity between the teams last year, and we'll know in a week whether the same is true this year.

My favorite character in westerns is the grizzled, thought-to-be-past-his-prime hermit who doubles as a gun-for-hire. Think Brian Keith in Young Guns. The NHL equivalent is Gary Roberts, the soon-to-be 43 workout machine who missed 43 games after snapping his leg and badly spraining his ankle. Most guys would pack it in for the year, but Roberts vowed he'd return for the playoffs and targeted the last five regular-season games for a tune-up. He only made it back for the last one, the season-ender in Philly on Sunday, so last night he played before the home crowd for the first time since December, scored a minute and change into the game and scored again with a couple minutes left in the game. The Roberts-Laraque-Talbot line did some amazing things last night to possess and cycle the puck and wear down the Ottawa defense last night. The usual saw in hockey is that fighters become insignificant in the playoffs because teams can't afford the penalties. Laraque, though, totaled over eight minutes of ice time last night, because while he's the league's heavyweight champ, he's also a guy who is ridiculously strong on the puck down low. I'd venture to say that if Laraque can play eight minutes a night and play even +/- hockey, the team will go really far. And here I'm just talking about the fourth line, whose play last night allowed Crosby to play less than eighteen minutes and Malkin to play less than twenty. The Penguins will need those guys to stay fresh.

On the evidence of one playoff game and the last eighty-two regular season games, there are two significant differences between this year's team and last year's. After the five-game beating the Penguins suffered last year, lots of observers looked longingly at the puck-moving abilities of the Ottawa defense and hoped the Penguins would acquire some of that skill. They have-- both from without and within. Kris Letang was promoted from the minors and moves the puck extremely fast and accurately. The team traded for Hal Gill at the deadline and while those easy jokes about his lack of mobility will always be with us, he's also very good at making breakout passes. Brooks Orpik has gotten much better at it, too. The second noticeable difference is that Michel Therrien's puck-possession system is really ingrained into every guy in the lineup card. I've been watching the Penguins for the last twenty years, and I can't ever recall another season where the forwards back-checked with the ferocity of this year's squad. Crosby, Malkin and Staal were all known to be ferocious back-checkers before, but Petr Sykora? I had no clue. And Marian Hossa will apparently have to answer for his past playoff scoring droughts from here until eternity, but would someone keep stats for how many times he breaks up an opponent's rush by some inspired back-checking? Or would that take too much work when one could just look at the scoresheet and draw a conclusion?

And what better start for the oft-maligned Marc-Andre Fleury than to record a shutout? He didn't get the best the Senators have to offer last night, but he made all the saves he was called on to make. We'll certainly hear more about his previous disappointments in various playoffs and tournaments before the year's done, but he's got the chance to put that all to rest. Plus, he's 1-0 in the playoffs while playing with his new white pads. I love the fact that he discarded the awesome yellow pads after the team received a letter from an Ottawa optometrist. Given how high-tech and overspecialized the business of professional sports has become, it seems like a quaint story from the days of yore that a layman could write an old-fashioned letter-- on paper and everything-- and a million-dollar goalie changes the color of his equipment.

Still, it's just one game. It's just one game.

The Long-Awaited Attorney/Wastrel 2008 Stanley Cup Conference Quarterfinal Picks

WALES CONFERENCE

Montreal (1) over Boston (8)-- Four games
Pittsburgh (2) over Ottawa (7)-- Five games
Washington (3) over Philadelphia (6)-- Seven games
New Jersey (5) over New York Rangers (4)-- Seven games

CAMPBELL CONFERENCE

Detroit (1) over Nashville (8)-- Five games
Calgary (7) over San Jose (2)-- Six games
Colorado (6) over Minnesota (3)-- Five games
Anaheim (4) over Dallas (5)-- Four games

March, 2008 Film Viewings

3/1/08 Gone Baby Gone (Affleck, 2007)
3/2/08 High Noon (Kramer, 1960)
When It Rains (Burnett, 2000)
3/3/08 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
3/4/08 Pierrot Le Fou (Godard, 1965)
3/5/08 Masculin Feminin (Godard, 1966)
3/7/08 The Wire 5.3
3/8/08 The Wire 5.4, 5.10
3/9/08 Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen, 1989)
3/10/08 The Wire 5.5
3/11/08 The Wire 5.6
3/12/08 Germania Anno Zero (Rosselini, 1952)
3/24/08 My Brother's Wedding (Burnett, 1983)