GAME FOUR RECAP (Penguins 4, Hurricanes 1)

Among the great and unique traditions found in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the best ones are the handshake line and the playoff beard. In previous posts, I've fawned at length over the handshake line. There was one of those tonight, and being on the right side of them never gets old. By this time in the postseason, the playoff beards have gotten about as good as they're going to get. Some guys, like Sidney Crosby, would not ever grow a beard at this point in their lives if not for the Stanley Cup playoffs. Sid's facial hair growth fits a pattern typically denoting rural poverty or Megan's Law registrant status. He's got long, sparse muttonchops, a thin mustache and a half-dozen hairs around his chin. Bill Guerin, on the other hand, couldn't have a single hair more on his face. Guerin's the only guy on the team who is older than I am, and his beard's got patches of white here and there, which is in keeping with the elder statesman role he's taken on since joining the team on the day of the trade deadline in exchange for a conditional draft pick. After the Penguins lost Marian Hossa and Ryan Malone in free agency last summer, Ray Shero tried to plug the holes by signing two free agent wings from the roster of the New York Islanders. Neither Miro Satan nor Ruslan Fedotenko put up impressive regular season numbers, and Satan didn't develop the chemistry with Sidney Crosby necessary to skate a regular shift on the top line. Given those developments, if I was a bit skeptical that adding another Islander to the Penguins roster was going to make a positive difference, can you blame me? Add to that the fact that Guerin had been underwhelming in recent playoff years-- he joined the Sharks in a deadline deal in 2007 and managed only two assists in nine games, and in his previous four playoff seasons, he'd scored only three goals and four assists over twenty-three games-- and I surely wasn't the only one who had considered Billy G.'s likely playoff contributions with the soft bigotry of low expectations. It turns out that all three Islanders have made valuable contributions, and it's fair to say that without the timely goals scored by Guerin and Fedotenko, the Penguins wouldn't be playing in the finals for a second consecutive year.

And there Guerin was, at the 12:10 mark of the second period, skating furiously with the speed of a man ten or fifteen years younger and scoring the goal that drove a stake through the Hurricanes' comeback chances and ruined the night of the RBC Center's weirdly-thrilled siren operator, pictured at left. It's been said more than once that hi-def's widescreen compositions and additional lines of resolution give the biggest boost to hockey among the televised spectator sports, but for my money the DVR has made all the difference in improving the at-home viewing experience. Football and baseball are sports made up of short bursts of action with a common starting point-- the snapping or pitching of the ball. Basketball, for its part, has frequent scoring and the resultant restarts from inbounding keep play from going on, unbroken, for extended periods of time. Hockey is different. Scoring is comparatively infrequent, and often play extends for a long period of time between goals, ping-ponging around and between players and teams. It's easy to look at the butterfly effect leading backward from a goal. This goal came from this shot, which was created by this turnover and that bounce, and so on and so on. The rewind feature of DVR technology has opened the anatomy of a hockey game up to the casual fan.

In the case of Guerin's goal, it began with Evgeni Malkin drawing a penalty that perhaps shouldn't have been called. He was checked by a Hurricane and struck by a high stick, but it may well have been his own stick. On the ensuing power play, Carolina's Eric Staal took the puck from the Penguins and entered their zone on a mission to get a short-handed goal. Staal had been criticized for not showing up in the series, but he was the best player on the ice in the early part of Game Four. He scored a nifty wraparound goal less than two minutes into the game in spite of the fact that Marc-Andre Fleury seemed to be glued to the post. Staal threw his body around with abandon, and if not for Cam Ward giving up a terrible goal to Max Talbot with less than two minutes to go in the first, the teams would have been tied halfway through the game. As it stood, if Staal scores a shorty there, the score is tied and the momentum is all Carolina's. As Staal broke in on his rush, Guerin backchecked and held the Hurricane who was trailing the play through the slot and looking for a juicy rebound. Staal never got a shot off, but Guerin's holding drew a whistle and ended the power play thirteen seconds after it started. After the teams played four-on-four, the Hurricanes found themselves with the briefest of power plays. Guerin busted out of the box and went directly to the right point, where Anton Babchuk had been inserted for the first time in the series to take booming slapshots on the man-advantage. Guerin got in Babchuk's way and swept the puck away from him and out to center ice, where Sid Crosby jumped on it and took off. Crosby swung wide to give himself room, and Guerin skated like a madman to catch up to the twenty-one year-old. Crosby sold the shot, then swung the pass across the slot for Guerin's tap-in.

Bill Guerin's now got seven goals and seven assists in seventeen playoff games with the Penguins. That's not quite a point per game, but it's light years ahead of the sub-.333 ppg of Guerin's recent playoff tenure. Can we just say at this point that Sidney Crosby is the elixir of youth and playoff accomplishment? Sure, we can. The guy who skated on Sid's right last year, Marian Hossa, arrived at the '08 trade deadline with a reputation for being a playoff underachiever. Sid helped him bury that bad rap-- Hossa scored twelve goals and fourteen assists in twenty games last year and would have got at least a few Conn Smythe votes if the Penguins had finished the job. This year, Hossa's got six goals and six assists in sixteen games, which approximates his playoff output from his pre-Penguin days, and is less than what Guerin's done this year on Sid's wing. Hossa would have cost the Penguins more than seven million a year, while Guerin's cost to the Penguins is less than a million dollars and a third-round draft pick.