It's officially the offseason, meaning the time is right to look into the future. We continue our division-by-division preview of the potential wheeling and dealing with the Atlantic Division.
It will be an interesting summer for the five teams in the Atlantic. Four teams made the playoffs, including the eventual Stanley Cup champion, and the one team that didn't make it -- the New York Islanders -- holds the first pick in Friday's draft, which isn't a bad consolation prize. All around it was a pretty successful season for these five teams.
DETROIT -- Extraordinary. Wait, that word isn't grand enough to describe what happened here Friday night. Thrilling? Stunning? It was both, and so much more. It was babyface goalie Marc-Andre Fleury making a couple of huge saves in the final, throat-clutching seconds. It was Sidney Crosby lifting the silver chalice and kissing it once, twice, barely buckling under his twisted knee. It was heavy-handed Maxime Talbot scoring a pair of improbable goals, while Evgeni Malkin raised his game to an entirely different level.
It was Marian Hossa dropping to his knees in sorrow, the pain that accompanies having to watch another team celebrate on his home ice for the second straight season almost unbearable. It was Chris Osgood, dazzling in goal, but not dazzling enough. It was a wave of wing-wheeled, veteran Europeans pushing the reigning champions as hard as they could be pushed, and the young, energetic pups in black refusing to budge.
It was Pittsburgh 2, Detroit 1, the Stanley Cup changing hands in spectacular fashion.
The Conn Smythe Trophy has been handed out since 1965. It's given to the most valuable player of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
In 2009, this was not an easy decision. There were plenty of viable candidates on both of the finalists, the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins. Though five players have won the Conn Smythe while playing for the team that lost the Finals, this was not a year for that to happen.
When the calendar flips to June, and the Stanley Cup Finals start, it seems to be a tradition for NHL officials' whistles to suddenly malfunction.
So far in this year's series, we've seen plenty of evidence that the officials are determined to "let the players play." This has been endorsed by members of both teams, but may have helped lead to a rather embarrassing display during Game 3 Tuesday night.
Without actually facing elimination, the Pittsburgh Penguins couldn't have faced a bigger must-win than they did Tuesday night. While Detroit hasn't truly dominated the Penguins in the opening two games of the Stanley Cup finals, they have played well enough to win both. Since there isn't much in hockey that's more dangerous than a hot Detroit team, the Penguins had to find a way to cool them off before things got out of hand.
Penguins 4, Red Wings 2: Recap | Box Score Red Wings lead series 2-1
Full disclosure: I'm a Penguins fan. As if you couldn't tell.
As the clock ticked down on the Penguins' season in the third period tonight, all I could think was, "No, not like this. How can the team I watched all season go down without a fight like this?" The third period of Game 5 was all Red Wings, from the drop of the puck to Pavel Datsyuk's tying goal, to Brian Ralfaski's go-ahead goal, all the way into the waning moments of what seemed to be the Penguins' season. As time ticked off, the Pens showed some life, but when does Stanley get put back into his case with an empty net? Apparently, the answer to that question is, "When Max Talbot says so."
Somehow, some way, the Penguins found a way to get things into overtime, at which point Marc-Andre Fleury took out his pen and rewrote the definition of "stealing a game for his team." 55 saves on 58 shots? Are you kidding me? He somehow kept the Penguins in things time and time again until Petr Sykora took a pass right on the tape from Evgeni Malkin and snapped home the game winner on the power play at the halfway point of the third overtime.
Are the Penguins going to win this series? I don't know. Honestly, it's still a pretty freaking long shot. What I do know is that no one can say this team didn't leave it all on the ice. After both guys have been excoriated in the press for ten days, Malkin hit Sykora with the pass that set up the winning goal, and they were just two guys out of a whole team that laid it on the line tonight.
When your team musters seven shots over two periods, it's pretty obvious something isn't working. Penguins coach Michel Therrien certainly isn't one to argue with that, as he said today that in light of the Pens' game one debacle in Detroit he's going to be shuffling his lines for game two. From the AP:
Is Therrien pushing the panic button already? It's hard to say. Malkin, and by extension Sykora, have been largely invisible in the past five or so games, while I think the physical Malone may compliment Hossa and Crosby much better than Dupuis does. Staal and Kennedy have both been playing great hockey during the playoffs and joining them with Dupuis makes a solid checking line, but it's hard to say how much offense that line might produce.
In fact, that makes me think that the symbolic of Malkin to the third line is more symbolic than anything. It's likely Therrien's attempt to motivate his struggling star. Pushing the right buttons to get his players to perform better is one of Therrien's strong suits (see: Orpik, Brooks). Will it work in this case? Hard to say.
It's been sixteen years since Mario Lemieux lifted the Stanley Cup high in Chicago Stadium, celebrating the Penguins' second consecutive championship. The franchise has hit a lot of ups and downs since that 6-5 win over the Blackhawks, nearly reaching the finals again in 1996 and 2002 and nearly fading into oblivion in 1999 and again in 2007.
Now that the team is back in the Finals, the question on every Pittsburgher's mind is, "Can they win it?" They're not the favorites and they're facing a much tougher task than they have in any of the first three rounds against the star-laden, veteran Detroit Red Wings. Given the lack of overlap between the conferences and the relative ease with which both teams dominated clearly inferior opponents in the playoffs, I can't tell you if the Penguins are going to win (also, I'm a Pens' fan and there's no way I'm jinxing this). What I can do is give you five solid reasons that the Penguins CAN win the Cup.
1. Evgeni Malkin- Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby get all the press, but there hasn't been a better player in the NHL than Malkin since mid-January. In the 21 games Crosby missed, Malkin scored 36 points. In the second half of the year, he's got 60. With Crosby back in the playoffs, Malkin hasn't missed a beat. Through Game 1 in the Flyers series, he had eight goals and nine assists. The Flyers targeted him from that point on, beat him up pretty good, and he only managed one goal and one assist in the final four games of the series, but with a week off he should be ready to go for the Finals. Sidney Crosby is the media darling, but Malkin is the guy that almost every Penguin fan wants with the puck on his stick in the last minutes of a close game.
Every day from Monday to Saturday, The Ice Sheet will take a look at the biggest stories in the league that happened on the ice and elsewhere the night before.
After seeing the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs speed by us at Mach 2, it seems as if we're in for something of a re-run in the Conference Finals, as the higher seeds both held serve on home ice to take a 2-0 series lead -- something our roundtable participants seemed to think was sure to be something of a death sentence for the lower seeds.
After Game One in Pittsburgh, Flyers head coach John Stevens said he wanted his team to cut down on the turnovers and bring a more physical game to the ice for Game Two against the Penguins, but it hardly mattered as the Pens prevailed, 4-2. So while the Flyers did tighten things up a bit and raised the bar physically, it wasn't as if the Pens weren't able to answer. If anything, it couldn't help but remind me of the line plenty of folks got fed about the Lemieux/Jagr-led Pens of the 1990s -- that simply because the Pittsburgh was so potent offensively that they might have a difficult time playing against more physical and tight checking squads.
Well, it wasn't true then, and it isn't true now -- not when you've got a slab of beef like Evgeni Makin who's willing to take your best shot, get off the ice and punish you with his skill (his Game One slapper shorthanded will be on playoff highlight films forever) and then stick his forearm into the earflap of your most skilled player, knocking him into next week (Daniel Briere). Throw in a goal from a player like Maxime Talbot, and well, it's hard not to think that all hope is lost in Philadelphia.
As if being up 1-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals after a fairly complete 4-2 win on Friday night wasn't enough, the Pittsburgh Penguins got some more good news today when Maxime Talbot said that his broken foot felt good enough to play on Sunday in Game 2. Talbot's missed the last three games after blocking a shot in the Penguins game 3 win over the Rangers in the second round.
As noted when Talbot went out, he's one of those players that people don't notice until he's not there, doing a solid job as the fourth line center and killing penalties for the Penguins in these playoffs. There's no word on who he'll be replacing, but it will amost certainly be Adam Hall, who's centering the fourth line now, or Pittsburgh folk hero Gary Roberts, who hasn't really done much since returning from a groin injury in the wake of Talbot's broken foot.
Though the Penguins went 2-1 without Mad Max, he's probably coming back at the best time possible as he's a solid defensive presence on the ice and the Flyers are likely to come out, well, flying in Game 2, desperate to avoid an 0-2 hole before they return to Philadelphia. That's assuming he's at full speed of course, but since the Penguins have other options, I doubt they'd want him to take the ice at another other speed.
It's officially the offseason, meaning the time is right to look into the future. We continue our division-by-division preview of the potential wheeling and dealing with the Atlantic Division. 
DETROIT -- Extraordinary. Wait, that word isn't grand enough to describe what happened here Friday night. Thrilling? Stunning? It was both, and so much more. It was babyface goalie 
When the calendar flips to June, and the Stanley Cup Finals start, it seems to be a tradition for NHL officials' whistles to suddenly malfunction.
When your team musters seven shots over two periods, it's pretty obvious something isn't working. Penguins coach 
Every day from Monday to Saturday, 
As if being up 1-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals after a fairly complete 4-2 win on Friday night wasn't enough, the Pittsburgh Penguins got some more good news today when 
