GAME FIVE RECAP (Flyers 3, Penguins 0)

Hey, wait. This did not go the way it was supposed to go. The storyline I had worked out called, predictably, for the home team to come out stormin' behind the throaty, white-clad crowd. They'd knock an early goal in against the Flyers, then as the Flyers opened things up to try to get back to square, the Penguins would get a second goal. Biron and the guys playing in front of him would think back to last year's Game Five, a 6-0 beatdown, and they'd wilt. By 9:30 there would be a handshake line at center ice and I'd be turning over to the third period of the Jersey-Carolina game to do a little advance scouting.

Well, the Penguins got the "come out stormin'" part right for the first twenty minutes. They threw fifteen shots at Martin Biron and played their best period since Game One. They won faceoffs and battles along the boards, stayed out of the penalty box and created some sustained pressure. In fact, they did everything but score. Biron inverted the Game Four storyline and played out of his mind. On their first power play, Sid won three offensive-zone draws and the Penguins got off five quality shots, but Biron turned them all away. As has been the case, the Staal-Kennedy-Cooke line played the best of the Penguins' lines at even-strength, and at one point in the first period Kennedy and Staal were alone behind the net with the puck. Biron expected Staal to come out on one side of the net and shaded over, only to have Kennedy take the puck the other way and peel around for a wrap-around. Biron was hung out to dry, and the puck would have been behind him and off the back of the net and back out before he had a chance to take his eyes of Jordan Staal. Winning the first goal battle has been, for all practical purposes, like winning the game in this playoff year. And it was right there for the taking. And then it was still right there, as the pitch was so fat that Kennedy got the yips and shot before his stick had cleared the post. His shot glanced harmlessly off the side of the net, and the dream was deferred.

There's no TK-dissing here. He's consistently been the best wing skating for the Penguins in this series. And if he didn't have such great chemistry with Staal and Cooke, I'd say he's earned time skating alongside either Crosby or Malkin.

Things fell apart from the start of the second period onward. I was liberated from sitting through the second, and as a result missed the Flyers' first goal and the disallowed tying goal that Evgeni Malkin kicked in. Apparently some piece of equipment in Atlanta was struck by lightning, and it killed the cable and satellite feed for forty-five minutes or so.

And so the series goes back to Philadelphia. Dan Bylsma, regrettably, has to figure out not only how to get a better effort out of his team, but also has to fall on his sword and reverse his lineup changes. Hey, I was all for doing something to prod Petr Sykora back to relevance, but I still can't understand scratching Kris Letang for Philip Boucher. Letang took a slash in Tuesday's game, but he wasn't replaced for injury reasons; he'd finished the last couple of games at -1, and when he got into a few late regular-season games, Boucher had a lot of success at getting shots from the point through traffic and onto the net. But it's tough for defensemen, even veterans, to get thrown midseries into the speed of playoff hockey, and Boucher brought home a -2 and direct responsibility for the Flyers' second goal when he tried to pass the puck out of the defensive zone rather than merely clearing it, and the resultant picked-off pass was sent over to the Flyers' Claude Giroux, who sent it into the net. A 1-0 third-period deficit is tough to overcome as it is, but 2-0 is pretty well insurmountable. Plus, this makes two years in a row that Letang has been scratched in the playoffs. His performance in the past has been up-and-down in proportion to his confidence, so undermining him at this point wasn't Disco Dan's best move.

GAME FOUR RECAP (Penguins 3, Flyers 1)

As a team, the Penguins were outplayed in Game Four. At even strength, from top to bottom, their first and second lines and fourth line didn't generate much of anything in the way of scoring chances or sustained pressure. The Flyers, conversely, were able to manufacture enough scoring chances to take 46 shots at Marc-Andre Fleury. The only problem for them was that he stopped 45 of them.

Fleury didn't exactly play poorly in Game Three. Two or three of the five goals he gave up could be laid at the feet of shoddy defense being played in front of him. Still, though, any time a goalie gives up that many goals, there's cause for concern as to how he'll bounce back. In Fleury's case, he looked confident from the start, and by the middle of the first period it was clear that he'd put the previous game behind him. He had great rebound control and positioning throughout. He stopped several one-timers and made up for minor defensive lapses. In the first, Scott Hartnell entered the zone covered by two or three Penguins, put on the brakes and dished a perfect saucer pass to a wide-open Claude Giroux, but Fleury turned him away, and turned every shot away until the Penguins built their slim two-goal lead. It's not difficult to imagine how much momentum the Flyers would have taken from getting the first goal and feeding off the resultant crowd frenzy, and given how ordinary the Penguins' offense and power play has been, it's not unlikely that the game outcome would have been different if the Flyers had scored first. The line between the Penguins being up 3-1 and down 3-1 is fairly slim here. Take away his phenomenal performance in Game Four and his save on Jeff Carter in Game Two which kept the Flyers from taking a two-goal lead in the third and the series is reversed.

Still, while they leaned heavily on Fleury because their offense and power play had been shut down, the team chipped in where needed by killing penalties better than they have all season and continuing to win clutch faceoffs. Crosby's success rate hovered at 60% again, and while the final game stats weren't heavily tilted in their favor, the Penguins won most of the crucial defensive-zone draws.
The Penguins killed 12:47 of short-handed time, while working with 6:55 of their own power-play time. As is often the case, offense comes from the strangest sources in the playoffs. Matt Cooke takes a stupid penalty and you wonder if this will be the one that leads to that crucial first goal. The Penguins kill the penalty, then as it expires, the Flyers' Kimmo Timonen has the puck at the top of the zone, and his blueline partner sees Cooke step out of the box and floats back to guard against the lead pass. This leaves Timmonen without an outlet, and he turns the puck over and it's sent up to Cooke, who passes it to Chris Kunitz. Kunitz throws the puck at Sidney Crosby and/or the net, and the above-pictured scene occurs. And while the officials did the obligatory replay review, that play's been a goal nearly every time I've seen it happen unless the puck appeared to be kicked in. Sure, it's a tough goal to give up-- as any goal would be in a game that tight-- but the fact that John Stevens is still complaining about it a day later speaks poorly to his focus on the task at hand.

As has been the case all series long, the Penguins' third line-- Jordan Staal, Tyler Kennedy and Matt Cooke-- was again their best line, and produced their lone even-strength goal. Finding linemates for Jordan Staal to center has long been an afterthought for the team in comparison to the search for wingers to play alongside Crosby and Malkin, but as things stand today, Staal's line has the best chemistry from game-to-game. It's got to be killing the Flyers' ability to match lines-- just when they've found the right combinations to shut down the top two lines, the Penguins' third line demands top-line defensive attention. It makes you wonder what the Penguins might be able to do if the top lines are able to put it together. Sykora continues to look forlorn every time he's on the ice; he was set up at the side of the net for a second-period tap in last night when the game was scoreless and couldn't finish. His body language immediately after missing the shot was painful to see. He's dying alive out there. The only upside of this happening now, if you can call it that, is that the team has the luxury of allowing him to play through it because they're managing to win these games.

GAME THREE RECAP (Flyers 6, Penguins 3)

The first two games of the series had lacked pretty goals. That's not uncommon in playoff hockey, but deflection goals and ugly goals can get a bit tiresome after a while, especially when there's as much offensive talent on the ice as there is in this series. Game Three broke the trend early and often, starting with Jeff Carter's beautiful goal three minutes in to give the Flyers a 1-0 lead. Carter took a feed in stride, blew past Bill Guerin, and stickhandled a backhander that froze Marc-Andre Fleury. It was a beautiful goal-- a goal-scorer's goal. After the Penguins had erased a two-goal deficit and tied the game up, the Flyers didn't wilt, but stormed back, starting with Claude Giroux finding some open space to take a great pass from Daniel Briere to make it 3-2, then breaking the Penguins' back on the penalty kill by stealing the puck from Sergei Gonchar, waiting and then feeding Simon Gagne for a short-handed goal to restore the two-goal lead. Both of these were well-executed goals that I couldn't help but admire, even as a partisan. The Penguins scored a nice goal of their own, as Evgeni Malkin threw a wicked seeing-eye wrist shot past Biron in the third period while on the power play. So, at least we've got to see some pretty goals. And now we're going to see a long series.

As an aside-- and I know I said this last year, too-- I'll just never understand the Philly crowd dynamic. They won't win a Stanley Cup backstopped by Martin Biron, but they've got one of the best two or three collections of forwards in hockey. From a skill perspective, it's lots of fun to watch Richards and Carter and Briere and Giroux and Gagne, and they'll get to watch those guys for years to come. So with all that talent wearing the home team's sweater, doesn't their lewd Crosby-baiting come across as almost pathetically self-loathing? The "Crosby sucks" refrain, aided now by the in-game organ to replace a pro-home team chant, is just there to be there. It's not like the jeering done to the road team's goalie when he's getting shelled. That's actually game-appropriate and time-honored. This is just sad.

It's worth noting here that NBC's hockey broadcasts aren't any fun to watch. Sure, I'm still bitter over their shortsighted decision to kill the Mellon Arena outdoor screen, but there were two serious amateur hour moments today. First, the Penguins' first goal was set up when Max Talbot chased the puck behind the Flyer net and immobilized Bradon Coburn until Ruslan Fedotenko could swoop in and feed the puck in front of the net to Evgeni Malkin. It was a fantastic play that got the Penguins back into the game, and the announcers were right to credit Dan Bylsma with some coaching genius there, but they repeatedly misidentified Fedotenko as Matt Cooke. Whether it was intentional or just a matter of cycling line changes, Bylsma got Malkin's line on at period end with Max Talbot on the ice in Petr Sykora's spot. Talbot hadn't played too many minutes to that point in the game as he doesn't get much power play or penalty-killing time, and he delivered the exact spark Bylsma was looking for. (It's worth noting that Sykora seems to have hit the wall. Later in the game Sid hit Sykora with a pass on the man-advantage when the game was still within reach, and while the pass was a little behind him, Sykora didn't try a one-timer, but settled the puck and stickhandled himself into position but didn't get off a good shot. We've seen him put imperfect passes into the net before, and so while it's unknown whether he's seeing the effects of a high mileage career affect him physically, or whether his long cold streak is just getting to him mentally, it's not all that inconceivable that he might not find himself watching Miro Satan take his lineup spot before the series is over. Bylsma stuck him back in his customary spot on Malkin's right to start the next period, but he can only let him play through this for so long.) Then, the Penguins' second goal was scored off a deflection off a Flyer, it was clear to anybody who saw a replay that it had changed direction, but NBC was disinterested in replaying the goal at an angle which would show where the deflection occurred.

GAME TWO RECAP (Penguins 3, Flyers 2, OT)

While it seems ungrateful to quibble with a 2-0 series lead under any circumstances, it still needs to be said: I'd prefer not to get a game-winning overtime goal with the Flyers at a two-man disadvantage. Yes, they were the second most-penalized team in the NHL this past season, and they deserved every penalty they took in Game One, and the two penalties the Flyers took in overtime were legitimate and probably has to be called, but there's still something skeevy about winning that way. And in a league like the NHL, where power play chances have a habit of evening out over the course of a game or a series, and the dispensers of karma wear striped shirts while most observers talk openly of the concept of "make-up calls," there's reason to look a gift horse like this in the mouth. Even moreso with the series heading to Philadelphia, where the crowd will fire up the Flyers, there's reason to think that not much will be called in Games Three and Four, and that what is called will look suspiciously like reparations.
The Flyers, for their part, should take encouragement out of the fact that they played exactly the way they had a month earlier, when they beat the Penguins 3-1 at Mellon Arena. In that game, and in Game Two, they played strong positional defense and took away the Penguins' ability to generate offense off the rush. They waited patiently for power play opportunities to create offense and made sure they capitalized on them. If they can play like that again, they will win either or both of their home games.
There's an interesting bit of clutchitude developing around Marc-Andre Fleury. He's not mentioned among the league's elite goaltenders, and if the Penguins win the Stanley Cup, that won't change much, as the credit will go to their centers. Despite having stats which are middle-of-pack, Fleury was 2-0 in playoff overtime games last year, and in every shootout this year when the Penguins had an opportunity to win the extra point if Fleury turned away the shooter, he prevailed.

GAME ONE RECAP (Penguins 4, Flyers 1)

Game One was just about the best outcome possible for the Penguins. That's a fairly obvious observation given the final score, but that aside, the team couldn't have had things working any better. Since they entered the NHL in 1967, the Flyers have been synonymous with physically aggressive play and physically aggressive players who skate right up to (and usually all over) the line of propriety. In a sport where fighting is penalized though not forbidden, the Flyers have always sought and projected an identity of being the toughest guys in a tough guys' league. Even when the guys in orange and black attract scoring talent, it tends to be of the pugilist-scorer hybrid variety. The Penguins, on the other hand, have since the mid-1980s largely been a team that collects offensive talent without any particular attention to aggressive tendencies. That's not to say that the Penguins haven't had aggressive players, unskilled fighters or dirty players. They've had all of those, and several of them were indispensable parts of winning teams. But they've never built their team identity around that, or at least they haven't since they lost enough games in 1984 to draft Mario Lemieux.

The biggest surprise of Wednesday night was that the Penguins came out the far more physical of the two teams, and they were able to do it without sacrificing their offensive game or ending up in the penalty box. Jordan Staal and Craig Adams knocked around every Flyer within reach, and the blueliners, to a man, took the body when they had the opportunity. There's a difference between playing smartly physical and dumbly physical, and the Flyers' response was to play dumbly physical and take lots of unnecessary penalties. The Penguins' power play still isn't as good as it should be, but their special teams strategy adjusted after taking a two-goal lead on the Flyers. There's no style points in winning by four or five goals at the possible expense of giving up a short-handed goal, so the team played safe most of their power plays from the halfway point on. Or maybe that's just how their not-that-good power play looked. Regardless, it worked, because even if they didn't pad their lead further on the power play, the Flyers were compelled to use Richards and Carter to tire themselves out killing penalties. Richards, by all accounts, looked spent after the game. And this trend will hold throughout the series if the Flyers continue to take lots of penalties unless they switch out their top PK unit. Crosby and Malkin won't see much PK time in this series, and they'll be comparatively fresher, which might help immensely in a Game Six or Seven. Sometimes it's a win just to be on the power play.

Of course, if the Penguins continue to win 64% of the faceoffs, it's difficult to imagine the series going to six or seven. The Penguins hadn't had a dominant faceoff presence since Ron Francis left in 2000, and had ranked among the worst teams in the league on draws over the past few years, but Crosby has steadily improved from year-to-year, from 49.8 in '06-'07 to 51.3 in '08-'09. He won 12 of 16draws, none bigger than the third-period face-off he won back to Sergei Gonchar, who sent the puck over to Mark Eaton, who took a slap shot that was deflected in for the fourth goal. Jordan Staal won 12 of 16 draws among everything else he did. Mike Richards, victimized by those two, won only 4 of 14.

Usually, but not always, the goalie who plays better wins a playoff series. There wasn't any question that Fleury, who came out to challenge shooters early and often, looked far more confident than Martin Biron. Fleury's still prone to misplaying the puck, and I'm among the fans who holds his breath every time he strays behind the net, but Biron's propensity for gaffes is far worse. The signature moment from Biron's night was when he made a fairly routine save on a thied-period wrist shot, then was caught on camera instinctively looking over his shoulder, wondering whether he'd given up another goal.

In a couple of hours, I'm hoping he'll be looking over his shoulder early and often.

Because this is the week for resurrections...

Today marks four years since I began this collection of watched-movie lists and Stanley Cup playoff game recaps. 269 posts over the past 2460 days works out to an average of one every 9.14 days, but that average is skewed heavily by 2005 and April-June, 2008. I've never had anything but modest goals for this endeavor, namely, to record what I was learning about film and to develop greater facility with writing through writing regularly. I'm not there yet, but those are still goals that I intend to realize.

To Damon, With Love: March, 2009 Film Viewings

3/5 Lakeview Terrace (LaBute, 2008)
3/8 The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925)
3/9 Antonio Gaudi (Teshigahara, 1984)
Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008)
3/13 Modern Romance (Brooks, 1981)
3/14 Race to Witch Mountain (Fickman, 2009)
3/21 The Earrings of Madame de (Ophuls, 1953)
3/23 The Class (Cantet, 2008)
3/27 High School Musical 3: Senior Year (Ortega, 2008)
3/28 Rachel Getting Married (Demme, 2008)
3/29 The Girl in Black Stockings (Koch, 1957)
3/31 La Jetee (Marker, 1962)