January, 2009 Film Viewings

1-1-09 Trafic (Tati, 1971)
1-2-09 Pickup on South Street (Fuller, 1953)
1-3-09 Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
1-4-09 My Favorite Wife (Kanin, 1940)
1-5-09 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jarmusch, 1999)
1-6-09 The Outlaw Josey Wales (Eastwood, 1976)
1-7-09 Pauline at the Beach (Rohmer, 1983)
1-11-09 Take the Money and Run (Allen, 1969)
1-12-09 Horton Hears a Who (Hayward and Martino, 2008)
1-15-08 Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2008)
1-25-08 La Ley de Deseo (Almodovar, 1987)
1-31-08 Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008)

December, 2008 Film Viewings

12/1/08 The Strangers (Bertino, 2008)
12/2/08 Ushpizin (Dar, 2004)
12/3/08 Good Mothers (Dreyer, 1942)
12/6/08 The Funeral (Ferrara, 1997)
12/8/08 Step Brothers (McKay, 2008)
12/13/08 The Kid (Chaplin, 1921)
12/14/08 Shampoo (Ashby, 1975)
12/20/08 The Limey (Soderbergh, 1999)
12/25/08 Dekalog: 2 (Kieslowski, 1988)
12/27/08 White Dog (Fuller, 1982)
12/30/08 The Happening (Shyamalan, 2008)

FM radio nearly changed my life.

While driving home tonight I was listening to FM radio. Donnie Iris's "Ah! Leah!" hit my speakers. This is not an unusual occurrence; Dahnie's a Pittsburgher, so we keep his signature song in frequent airplay. After it ended, I scanned around and landed on the last half of Train's "Meet Virginia." That song kicked out, and with buoyed spirits I started hitting the seek button furiously in hopes of completing the trifecta. I only needed to hear a note or two of "Ruby" by Kaiser Chiefs or "Ruby Tuesday" or, creepiness-be-damned, Kenny Rogers's "Ruby," or one of the 482 other songs with my middle daughter's name in the title. I seeked (sought?) up and down the digital dial, but I was denied.

This bumper sticker...

...was awesome before I started watching the Venture Bros. Now it is transcendent.

November, 2008 Film Viewings

11/1 Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954)
11/2 My Night at Maud's (Rohmer, 1969)
11/3 The Lookout (Frank, 2007)
11/4 Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932)
11/5 Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998)
11/7 The Pilgrim (Chaplin, 1923)
11/8 Gates of Heaven (Morris, 1977)
11/10 Waltz With Bashir (Folman, 2008)
The Trap (Golubovic, 2007)
11/11 Samaritan Girl (Kim, 2004)
11/13 My Father My Lord (Volach, 2007)
Three Monkeys (Ceylan, 2008)
11/14 Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (Rozema, 2008)
11/15 Ballast (Hammer, 2008)
11/16 La Promesse (Dardenne and Dardenne, 1996)
11/20 Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947)
11/21 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
11/22 One Day You'll Understand (Gitai, 2008)
11/23 Synechdoche, NY (Kaufman, 2008)
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Thurber, 200-whenever it slouches onto DVD)
11/25 Repo Man (Cox, 1984)
11/26 Time (Kim, 2006)
11/27 Vernon, Florida (Morris, 1981)
11/30 The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940)

October, 2008 Film Viewings

10/4 The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
10/5 The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
10/8 Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Stoller, 2008)
10/9 Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)
10/10 The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)
10/11 The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1942 version)
10/12 Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)
10/16 The Kite (Sabag, 2003)
10/17 L'Enfant (Dardenne and Dardenne, 2005)
10/18 My Night at Maud's (Rohmer, 1969)
10/19 L'Enfant (Dardenne and Dardenne, 2005)
10/24 The Circus (Chaplin, 1928)
10/25 Ostrov (Loungine, 2006)
10/26 Ostrov (Loungine, 2006)
10/28 The Incredible Hulk (Leterrier, 2008)
10/31 Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)

Let Us Rumble

September, 2008 Film Viewings

9/1 My Winnipeg (Maddin, 2008)
Tell No One (Canet, 2006)
9/5 Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
9/6 Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Lumet, 2007)
9/8 Stromboli (Rosselini, 1950)
9/12 My Kid Could Paint That (Bar-Lev, 2007)
9/13 Kept and Wanted (Fogwill, 2005)
Opera Jawa (Nugroho, 2008)
9/19 The Red Balloon (Lamorisse, 1957)
9/26 Harvey (Koster, 1950)
9/27 Lars and the Real Girl (Gillespie, 2007)
9/28 Lars and the Real Girl (Gillespie, 2007)

August, 2008 Film Viewings

8/1 The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925)
8/2 Twenty-Four Realities Per Second (Kusturica and Testor, 2005)
8/3 Pay Day (Chaplin, 1922)
8/4 Woman Is the Future of Man (Hong, 2004)
8/5 The Wild Angels (Corman, 1966)
8/6 The Kid (Chaplin, 1921)
8/7 When Did You Last See Your Father? (Tucker, 2007)
8/8 City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
8/15 The Idle Class (Chaplin, 1921)
8/22 The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008)
8/23 Frantic (Polanski, 1988)
8/26 The Kid (Chaplin, 1921)
8/31 Wall-E (Stanton, 2008)

Theme song

One of the collateral benefits of signing certain Scandinavian hockey players is the possibility that they come with their own theme songs. I'm hoping the Mellon Arena in-game producers will have the will and the occasion to play Janne Pesonen's ridiculously catchy music at appropriate times.

I'm a bit concerned that the highlights end around the two-minute mark. Please tell me that doesn't mean anything.

July, 2008 Film Viewings

7.1 After Hours (Scorsese, 1985)
7.7 Rambo (Stallone, 2008)
7.10 Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968)
7.12 Beetlejuice (Burton, 1988)
7.20 Benny's Video (Haneke, 1993)
7.22 The Singing Revolution (Tusty and Tusty, 2006)
7.26 El Orfanato (Bayona, 2007)

The Severed Umbilical Cord

"Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; "eternal values," "immortality" and "masterpiece" were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and flase, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal."

Author--?

I don't know...

when, if ever, I'll get around to seeing the new Batman movie, but I'm glad it exists if only because it inspired this photoshop:

(Image created by Michael W, posted on The Pensblog.)

Decisions, decisions.

Sure, there's been some rather significant roster churning for the Pittsburgh Penguins over the last nine days, but let's look on the bright side: if you're in the market for a Penguins sweater with a jazzy name on the back, there's nothing but upside in this year's acquisitions.

While the name is not completely legible in the below photo (and there doesn't seem to be a better shot of it on the net), the team has re-signed the defenseman with the same last name as the minister from The Simpsons:

...while they've also signed his adversary:

Plus, for the cinephile contingent, the team added this guy:

I'm leaning toward a road JLG jersey and a Prince of Darkness t-shirt.

June, 2008 Film Viewings

june 1: Die! Die! My Darling! (Narizzano, 1965)
june 2: Contempt (Godard, 1963)
june 3: In the Valley of Elah (Haggis, 2007)
june 4: Purple Noon (Clement, 1960)
june 5: Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981)
june 6: Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)
june 7: Three Times (Hou, 2005)
june 8: Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
june 9: Funny Games (Haneke, 1997)
june 10: Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008)
june 11: Funny Games (Haneke, 2008)
june 12: Turnabout (Roach, 1940)
june 13: Kung Fu Panda (Osborne and Stevenson, 2008)
june 14: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Helm, 2007)
june 15: Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2008)
june 22: Be Kind Rewind (Gondry, 2008)
june 23: Alexandra (Sokurov, 2007)
june 28: The Heart of the World (Maddin, 2000)
june 29: Wall-E (Stanton, 2008)

We Are Twins Born in the Sign of Gemini

For a while, I described Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World as the six-minute answer to the question of why I love cinema. In the past nine months or so, though, it's been displaced by the above clip from Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort. The film ran on one of our HD channels for a while, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they don't market hi-def televisions by showing excerpts of Rochefort rather than bits of those interminable Caribbean pirates movies. I suppose this will tell you exactly why I'll never pull down a paycheck marketing products for Best Buy, but I'm serious. The film's bright and vivid colors and the elaborate contrasts in the production design come alive in hi-def, so the cropping of the above video is only part of its infirmity.

There's a game I play with my daughters. I'll quietly whistle the first few notes of the song in the clip and then stop. I never have to wait more than a few seconds before one of the older girls starts humming or whistling the rest of the song, often without knowing it. The song lasts two minutes and forty-two seconds, more or less. In those one hundred and sixty-two seconds, there are fifteen different shots, with an average length of over ten seconds per shot, or a glacial pace by Baz Luhrmann standards. The shots alternate between the full-length shots of the sisters, medium shots of them and the close-ups for particular lines to be sung. I can't get enough of it.

Oh, boy

Coming this fall, says Puck Daddy.
And the people rejoiced.

Virginia (4) and Ruby (8) Jumping From the 3 Meter Dive

May, 2008 Film Viewings

Thursday, May 1, 2008: Lars and the Real Girl (Gillespie, 2007)
Friday, May 2, 2008: Signs (Shyamalan, 2004)
Saturday, May 3, 2008: The Blizzard (1899)
Lower Broadway (Bonine, 1902)
Beginning of a Skyscraper (Bonine, 1902)
Sunday, May 4, 2008: Panorama from Times Building, New York (McCutcheon, 1905)
Skyscrapers of NYC from North River (Smith, 1903)
Panorama from the Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (Bitzer, 1903)
Monday, May 5, 2008: Hard Candy (Slade, 2006)
Tuesday, May 6, 2008: Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre (Armitage, 1901)
Coney Island at Night (Porter, 1901)
Interior New York Subway 14th Street to 42nd Street (Bitzer, 1905)
Wednesday, May 7, 2008: Seeing New York by Yacht (Armitage, 1902)
Manhatta (Sheeler and Strand, 1921)
A Bronx Morning (Leyda, 1931)
Saturday, May 10, 2008: Amal (Mehta, 2007)
Thursday, May 15, 2008: The Leopard Man (Tourneur, 1943)
Friday, May 16, 2008: The Edge of Heaven (Akin, 2007)
Saturday, May 17, 2008: Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008: We Own the Night
(Gray, 2007)
Sunday, May 25, 2008: The Darjeeling Limited (Anderson, 2007)
Monday, May 26, 2008: Head-On (Akin, 2004)
Friday, May 30, 2008: There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)

Game Four Recap (Red Wings 2, Penguins 1)

No photo tonight, as none could adequately express the ridiculousness of giving up the goal that effectively ends your chance at the Stanley Cup while running around in your own end and failing to clear the puck out despite ample chance to do so, leading to Jiri Hudler's weak over-the-shoulder tally that broke the Penguins' back. And you can't even say the ensuing suffocation of Detroit's preventative trap made that second goal hold up; that 5-on-3 should have led to a goal, and when it expired, the carriage turned back into a pumpkin.

On a positive note-- the only single positive note-- the goal Hossa scored to put the home team on the board replaces Johan Franzen's goal in game three as the prettiest one in the series. He sold everyone in the building that he was going to go wraparound, but then at the last moment broke his wrist over and shoved the wrist shot past Osgood. I'll miss those great hands next year when he's playing for the Rangers or the Habs.

Game Three Recap (Penguins 3, Red Wings 2)

There was a seven minute or so stretch in the third period of Game Four that went end-to-end more than a dozen times without a whistle. The Penguins were leading 3-1 at the time and trying to add to their lead, while the Red Wings were pulling out all the stops to get back into the game. It was the most entertaining stretch of any sporting event I can remember seeing in some time. There were a couple of near-goals, several other shots and an endless stream of sleek skating and precise passing by two extremely talented teams. Of course, there were also four well-hyped checks...

It was the sort of thing you could never get from a football or baseball game, either of which can be fairly characterized as brief spasms of activity followed by a longer interval of talented people standing around waiting for the next spasm. Game Three remains on our DVR, and if the series goes the right way, I'll take the time to break it down more precisely.

Despite all that, only one of tonight's five total goals could be described as pretty to see. Johan Franzen's goal to make it 2-1 was a fantastic one-man effort to thread through the Penguins' penalty killers and surprise Fleury with a move to the net. The rest of the goals could be more fairly characterized as garbage goals, but they still count the same.

By the end of the night, we should know if we have a series.

Game Two Recap (Red Wings 3, Penguins 0)

Listen, I knew it was going to be a difficult series to win, but if you'd told me that through two games the Penguins wouldn't even have a goal...
The irony is that while several of the team's top players are very young, the number of underpaid free agents-to-be is so significant that the team has a very definite compulsion to win now because they can't keep everybody. I'm wondering whether this non-appearance by several guys in the Finals might keep the asking prices more manageable.

Game One Recap (Red Wings 4, Penguins 0)

So now we know how it feels. Here's a partial list of great offensive players who were nearly invisible during the first three rounds the Penguins played: Dany Heatley, Jason Spezza, Daniel Alfredsson, Scott Gomez, Brendan Shanahan, Chris Drury, Daniel Briere. About $50 million of goal-scoring on an annual basis, but completely inconsequential against the Penguins this year. But I can't remember anything of significance done by Marian Hossa, Petr Sykora or Evgeni Malkin in last night's game. Well, other than Malkin mishandling Fleury's clearing attempt and setting the table for Detroit's second goal which effectively ended the game. Two-goal leads held by that Red Wings team just aren't going to be overcome by anybody.

The game really didn't start out too bad. Although the Penguins failed to score on those four plower plays in the first period, the play was even. When Detroit came out for the second period, however, it looked every bit like they'd become convinced that they'd withstood the worst of the Penguins' offensive firepower, and they started in with playing their game. The Penguins obliged by making bad passes and failing to clear out the defensive zone. It was a little hard not to be disappointed with the softness of the Wings' first goal-- I'm guessing everyone at Joe Louis Arena other than Marc-Andre Fleury and everybody watching on television could see that Samuelsson was going for the wraparound-- but Fleury'd kept the Penguins in the game to that point, and it wasn't his fault that they'd been unable to do anything in the previous thirty minutes of play.

Therrien wasted no time in announcing new lines for Game Two. Getting Roberts into the lineup was a given, and if his impact is anywhere near his contribution in Game One of the Senators' series, then the Penguins will earn a split in Detroit. I like the other moves as well. Something needs to be done to jolt Malkin back to playing his game. At this point, he's avoiding contact whenever he can and largely staying out of the slot and around the perimeter. The Wings have something to do with that, but Malkin has to fight through it. It might look a little like Therrien's pushing the panic button a little too quickly, but if they drop the second game, he's still got time to make another move or two when the series heads back home.

The Stanley Cup Finals

The Penguins and the Red Wings fight it out in the Finals beginning tonight. The two teams match up well together, as both like to possess the puck and rely on skill more than grit to win games. I don't take issue with the majority view that the Penguins have an edge in the quality of their forwards that's probably not as significant as the edge Detroit has on the blueline. But like everybody else, I'm just anxious to see what the teams look like on the ice together, given that they haven't played a game of any consequence against each other for quite a while, and they have no playoff history whatsoever. But even if the two teams don't have a significant history with each other, I do have one with the two of them.

Back in January of 1989, for an early eighteenth birthday present, I received tickets to a Penguins-Red Wings game. It was my first opportunity to see Mario Lemieux play. ¹ And ever since I'd seen John Hughes stick a Gordie Howe jersey on Alan Ruck, I'd been an admirer of the winged wheel and was flirting with sports bigamy. We had an extra ticket, so I decided I'd ask to the game a beautiful and tall girl I'd been working up the courage to ask out for a few months. It would have been a bad idea to make that our first date, so the upcoming game put a deadline on me getting over my shyness and asking her out beforehand. We had dinner a few times and went to a movie or two, but the game was our first time spending hours and hours together.

Our seats were right on the glass in the corner next to the tunnel where the Red Wings came out and close to the goal where the Penguins shoot twice. With nothing but rounded plexiglass separating you from the players it's hard not to be dazzled by the size and speed of the players. The game was the sort of firewagon score-a-rama that would make anyone a fan and which stopped happening after the '92'93 season. I've been unsuccessful in tracking down a box score, but the Penguins won by something like 10-8. Lemieux was in the midst of his 199-point season and the Wings' captain, Steve Yzerman, was blossoming into a superstar around that time. But it's funny to think of the context of that first prolonged date. Hockey games are fairly raucous occasions, and not the easiest place to converse. We were at that early uncertain point in a potential relationship which, for two shy people, feels like a dance of carefully-chosen words and overscrutinized gestures. But we had a great time and saw a fantastic game. Next week, between games three and four of the series, that girl and I will celebrate our fifteenth anniversary.

Really, it seems pointless for me to make a prediction about the series, as I'm wholly unable to separate heart from head. But I'm also drawn to the potential to will this series to the conclusion I want to see, so I'll say the Penguins will win in six games, and then skate the Stanley Cup around the old barn on the hill.

The end.

1 I hadn't even seen #66 play on television. Around that time, there wasn't any significant television coverage of the NHL, even locally. Cable TV saw the light a year or two later, and all of the Penguin games have been broadcast on cable networks since the early nineties. Ironically, the local cable television situation regarding the Penguins is actually worse today than it was in the early nineties. I was able to watch every game of the Penguins' '91 and '92 Stanley Cup playoff runs on cable TV with local announcers, and couldn't have cared less that it wasn't being covered nationally. This year, every game from the middle of the second round on with the exception of two has been broadcast exclusively by the Outdoor Life Network, which isn't available everywhere in Western Pennsylvania.

Fantastique!

(Thanks, DL)

Just a reminder:

Here are the two goals which effectively-- though not literally-- won the Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992. The 1991 goal is still the best one I've ever seen.

Game Five Recap (Penguins 6, Flyers 0)

We have no way of knowing whether he'll lead the team to a Stanley Cup this year or any year, or whether Sidney Crosby will be able to ultimately make any significant dents in the NHL's scoring records. But here, today, at the age of twenty he's done something that neither Mario Lemieux nor Jaromir Jagr was ever able to do.

He's captained a team that beat the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs.

Sunday's game was about the best imaginable response to losing game 4 on the road. From top to bottom, the team went back to doing every last thing that had made them successful over the first thirteen playoff games. They played good defense, won the battles for the puck and made sure the Flyers didn't establish any presence around the goal crease. Three plays in particular really stood out to demonstrate the team's attention to detail.

First, with the Penguins holding a then-tenuous 1-0 lead, the puck was dumped into the Flyers end to the right of the net. Biron made an ill-advised decision to try to play it, and didn't actually get to the puck too much in advance of Ryan Malone. Malone and Biron were both against the boards for an instant fighting for the puck, and in the process Malone's body pinned Biron's goalie stick against the boards. Biron took a shot at Malone, then hustled to get back into the net while giving up on dislodging his stick. If it was a penalty on Malone's part, it was far too incidental and unintentional-looking to draw a call. A moment later Malone fed the puck to Malkin, who stuffed in a wraparound that the stickless Biron was unable to stop.

In the second period, with the Penguins still up 2-0, a Penguin d-man made a breakout pass off the boards to Sidney Crosby, and all of the Penguin forwards had begun heading up the ice and out of the defensive zone. The bank pass caromed badly, though, and the pass was behind Crosby and right on the stick of Mike Richards of the Flyers. Richards was left in the slot with a fantastic scoring chance, but Crosby hustled back and pickpocketed the puck and sent it the other way. We've seen that move dozens of times this postseason by the Penguins. Marian Hossa does it so often it's like he's shamed the rest of the team into sneaking up behind the other team's puckcarriers and stealing it from them. Crosby sends the puck the other way and it leads less than half a minute later to his backhanded feed to Hossa for the one-timer that made it 3-0.

Third, in the third period, with a six-goal lead, Fleury makes the spectacular above-pictured save on Jeff Carter of the Flyers. The game wasn't in doubt by that time, but Fleury was as sharp as could be.

It's the little things.

Game Four Recap (Flyers 4, Penguins 2)

"Daddy, what does Crosby sucks mean?" "Oh, it's just something they say." Who knows how many of the 19,972 Most Intimidating Fans Innaworld joined in the chant, but it was enough to hear it distinctly on the telecast. But add that to the above picture, where the Penguins had just scored a fluky goal to cut the deficit to 3-1 in the third period. You can see at least one guy flipping them off, though the TV footage caught a moment before or after this picture where there were at least four or five guys gesturing. I rewound it three or four times just for the sake of schadenfreude. Let me be clear-- I'm not bringing this up so much to claim regional high ground. At the first hockey game I ever saw, on January 30, 1982 between the Penguins and the Winnipeg Jets, somebody'd hung a banner from the E Balcony that announced JETS SUCK and formally introduced me to that pejorative. And I've been to a Steeler game with my oldest daughter in tow where the Iron City boys break out a "Cleveland Sucks" chant moments before passing out on their way back to the stadium lots. It shouldn't happen anywhere, though. There's a clear difference between jeering that isn't profane and the sort of anti-social behavior that some isolated elements of the Philly crowd goes in for. And they love it all the more when somebody points it out. I suppose it comes with the territory-- I guess I wouldn't be talking about this if I was writing about, you know, Cannes now or something. But still-- are we human beings trying to be hockey fans or hockey fans trying to be human beings?

On the game itself, there's not a lot to say. The Flyers came out and played a fantastic first period. They didn't give up an early goal, got the first goal themselves and their power play worked just as they'd wanted it to work all along, with shots on net leading to rebounds and net-crashing garbage goals. Their power play and their offense overall hadn't had that mojo working since the early part of Game One, or it would be a different series. Defensively, the Flyers did a perfect job of pushing Crosby and Malkin away from the slot and toward the endboards when they had the puck, and Malkin alone was forced into what seemed like at least a dozen bad passes. Jordan Staal came to play, though, and if there's anything the team can take from the game, it's the fact that the guy who had the most cause to be distracted last night was one of the few guys who brought his best game.

This YouTube....Completes Me

Game Three Recap (Penguins 4, Flyers 1)

After the Penguins beat the Flyers last night to take a 3-0 series lead, a Philly beat writer asked Flyers coach John Stevens if the Penguins were playing a neutral zone trap. Stevens spat out his reply as if responding to an expletive and said that was exactly what they were doing. So when they're not benefiting from incompetent officiating, the Penguins are employing a soul-destroying and game-deadening style of play. No wonder he hates them.

He's exactly wrong, of course. Sure, the Penguins were rocking the one-forechecker 1-2-2 for nearly the entire third period, but that's standard operating procedure in the Stanley Cup playoffs when you're protecting a late lead. But the system they played in the first two periods, before it was time to kill the clock, is not the neutral zone trap, and it's a bit of an affront to call it that. It's the same way they've been playing throughout the playoffs, it's the same way Michel Therrien was making the team's prospects play when he coached the farm team for two and a half years, and he brought the same style to the parent club in December of 2005. It's just that only now-- two and a half years after he was hired-- has the team bought into his system to the degree that they can consistently play within it. It hasn't come easily. He's had to come down hard in particular, at least in public, on the team's defensive corps, by first calling them out as a group in public ("I really think they're trying to be the worst group in the league," he lamented during his first partial season, the 05-06 debacle), and more recently by exiling Ryan Whitney and Brooks Orpik to separate gulags of playing wing instead of defense. So the team is playing extremely well now, but they're not playing the neutral zone trap.

We know a little bit about what it's like to play the trap. After being beaten by the trapping Devils in the '95 playoffs and the trapping Panthers in the '96 playoffs, the team figured if you couldn't beat 'em, then blah blah blah and hired Kevin Constantine to coach the team beginning in the '97-'98 season. Constantine's two years and change behind the bench weren't a total loss-- there was a playoff series against the Devils in '99 that ranks as Jaromir Jagr's best playoff performance-- but the defensive style the team played was bland given the skill of the (mostly European) roster, and when the team got off to a lousy start, it was easy to make the trap the scapegoat. The team brought in Herb Brooks to pick up the pieces, and his comments about what he hated about the way the team was playing were pretty telling. The interwebs are failing me here in finding the link, but Herbie specifically said that what he hated about how the Penguins were playing under Constantine were that (1) the team never wanted to have the puck, and how can you score when you don't have the puck? and (2) that the team wasn't skating, and the object of the game was to skate.

How do I know you're not a neutral zone trap? Well, because if a neutral zone trap is about puck dispossession and non-skating, those are the last two adjectives you'd use to describe the 2008 Pittsburgh Penguins. It's a shame no one keeps a stat on puck possession. I'd love to see what sort of time-of-possession numbers the Penguins are putting up this postseason. Sure, it'd be tough to do, but watching just a period or two makes clear that the Penguins are a team that wants to possess the puck just about everywhere on the ice. They want it, and they want to keep it for as long as possible. Maybe that sounds ridiculously obvious, but in the modern NHL, it isn't. There are lots of bad things that can happen when you have the puck-- you can make a bad pass or have it swiped away from your stick and give up a scoring chance to the other team. One well-trod path to success for several teams has been to play a style that de-emphasizes puck possession and concentrates on making the other team possess the puck under the worst of circumstances by clogging the neutral zone passing lanes, forcing turnovers and looking for odd-man breaks. When teams that play that style come into possession of the puck where there's no layup opportunity, they dump-and-chase or make some other low-percentage play, and if it results in the other team regaining possession in their own end, so much the better to try to force another turnover. That's not this team; they know they can win if they keep the puck all game long, and they have the confidence in their passing, puck-possession and protection skills to keep it up. It's a style of play that requires making safe plays, lots of skating and relentless backchecking and forechecking, and it's a lot of fun to watch. The highlight video you can assemble from the '07-'08 Penguins probably isn't as thrilling as the one you'd get from the '92-'93 squad who scored like a Sega team, but the attention to detail is really worth appreciating. It takes talent to execute it, of course, but it also takes coaching.

Like every hockey coach who has ever lived, Michel Therrien has lots of detractors. They're mostly quiet now in light of the team's success, but they'll be back when the team loses a few games or starts slow next year or can't win in Nashville in January. For lots of the young Penguins who played under Therrien in the minors, he's effectively been their only coach in the pros, and it's clear that they buy into what he's saying. He's saying it in a fairly endearing form of mangled Frenglish, but when the Penguins hire a coach, we expect there will be communication issues.

After falling behind 3-0 in the series, the Flyers may be in a trap, but they're not being trapped. And appropriate to the 3-game lead, there are three things that stand out from Game Three. First, Marian Hossa's first goal-- the one being celebrated above-- on a seeing-eye shot off the rush that showed just how flatfooted Martin Biron and the team playing in front of him have been. Second, when Philly's Mike Richards-- who is entering Ron Francis territory with his two-way play-- stole the puck from Ryan Whitney at the point and swooped in for a momentum-changing short-handed chance only to have Sergei Gonchar hustle to get back and dive to knock the puck off his stick at the precise moment when he could both avoid a penalty and disrupt the scoring chance. It was a fantastic play from a guy who has been maligned at times for his defensive work. And last, the egregious Steve Downie turnover that led to Ryan Malone's goal to ice the game. Downie's made some costly rookie mistakes, but Stevens put him in the lineup twice hoping he'd make a hit or two. Oh, he can do that. He put a nice hit on Petr Sykora right about the time Ryan Malone and Evgeni Malkin were raising their hands to celebrate the goal. Contrast Downie with the Penguins' Tyler Kennedy, an undersized third-line plugger who never stops skating. Both are rookies playing in their first playoffs, but Kennedy makes the smart plays, never hurts his team and gets the occasional rush or check or Upshall-beating. The writers who get paid will say the difference in the series has been the Penguins' stars or the Flyers' injuries or the inconsistent officiating, but it's really as simple as the difference between Steve Downie and Tyler Kennedy.