Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Penguins 4, Red Wings 2

The Pens are now one win away from holding serve and going back to Detroit with all the momentum. It was a great win tonight, but let's put this one out of our minds as quickly as possible. Thursday is now the most important day.

The power play came through BIG TIME with two huge goals when the team needed them. Great job on that end of things.

One other thing - as soon as the game was over, Versus cut away from their postgame show to broadcast Sports Soup. What the #$#$%?? Who made that stupid decision? Good thing FSN was able to put a postgame show on the air. While we're blasting Versus, we have to thank them for saying NOTHING about Satan's penalty in the second. We didn't even know who was in the box or what they did. Can anyone show a replay any more? Can we stop hearing about the intermission report? Please?

First period:

Things started well when Talbot scored on a nice feed from Geno on the half-wall. Max wristed the puck past Osgood on the short side.

The Wings tied it up not long after when Zetterberg was left standing with nothing between him and Fleury after a fortuitous bounce. Henrik didn't need that much help and blasted the puck behind Fleury.

About four minutes later, the Wings were on the power play and committed pretty blatant interference to help keep the puck in the zone. Edzo made reference to it ("subtle interference") and the Wings cashed in later in the power play.

The Pens tied the score when Letang beat Osgood on the power play to the five hole. It was a weak goal for Osgood to allow, to be honest. There was almost no screen, and he had time to square up to Letang.

Second period:

Samuelsson hit the post.

Seriously - that's about all that happened for those 20 minutes.

The Pens only had 4 shots on goal and both teams were content to stay back and wait for the other team to make a mistake. Neither one did.

Third period:

The Pens came out in the third like their season depended on it.

Their effort paid off. They drew a penalty when the Wings were called for interference. Gonchar blasted the puck past Osgood to give the Pens the lead.

The Pens weathered two storms in the next few minutes. One was immediately after the goal and the other was a few minutes after that. Both times, Detroit was able to generate sustained pressure, and both times they were unable to score.

All of a sudden, the Pens were generating more good chances than they had all series so far. Sid and Kunitz had a 2-on-1 (Sid to the puck to Kunitz just a second too late to do much with it). Talbot hit the post and had another chance alone in front of Osgood.

Talbot earned redemption for his missed chances by putting the puck into the empty net after the Wings pulled Osgood. It made me a bit nervous when they played Mike Lange's clip about Elvis has just left the building because there was almost a minute left... but the Wings didn't pull Osgood again.

1 comment:

Toad268 said...

I will give you credit, you took a lot of crap for your last post...way to keep on keeping on!

Is this it? Was Max Talbot the catalyst once again? Is that the start of history? We will surely find out. I am going to say one word. Momentum. It is vital to winning and losing in high pressure, extreme situation games. After two games back to back, where we never really had too much of it, but still somewhat dominated the games, we finally have it. We know we can outplay them, but until tonight, we couldn't beat them.

Read more » http://www.everythingpittsburgh.net/blogs/EP.php/2009/06/03/the-start-of-something#more152