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.