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.