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.