Saturday, May 09, 2009

Penguins 4, Capitals 3 (OT)

One more win.

One more win moves the Pens onto the Eastern Conference Finals.

One more win sends Ovechkin home with a sad look on his face.

I'm hoping that the Pens can get one more win.

This game, however, was another great playoff game. This could go down as one of the all-time great series in Penguins playoff history.

The tendency when thinking about a game like this one is to skip to the end, and that's (almost) what I'm going to do.

The Pens were down 2-1 going into the third period. They came out early in the third and took the lead within the first 7 minutes. Fedotenko continued his shooting (TEN shots for Ruslan tonight) with a goal early in the third, and Cookie put in a rebound following a jailbreak around Varlamov later in the third.

The Caps, who battled tonight, managed to tie the game with just over 4 minutes left in the third on a goal by O-Face.

OT was highly exciting. The Caps missed an open net when the puck wouldn't settle down for Steckel.

The action was end-to-end for a few rushes, when Federov (who was playing defense) tripped Malkin, putting the Pens on the power play.

Geno torched Federov at the very end of the power play again, and when he tried to go to Sid, the puck deflected off of a diving Tom Poti and behind Varlamov. HUGE play.

Versus showed a stat that teams that won Game 5 in a 2-2 series won 80% of the series.

Let's hope that holds in this case.

Next up: A must-win game at home on Monday. You don't want to come back to Washington.

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