Penguins' Sidney Crosby skates toward his bench after scoring the deciding goal in the shootout against the Flyers.
Friday, February 09, 2007
By Dave Molinari, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PHILADELPHIA -- Sidney Crosby wasn't thinking about how Philadelphia had just shut him out for only the second time in 15 career meetings.
He wasn't dwelling on his history of shootout futility, either. On how he was 0 for 7 in them this season.
His only concern was figuring out how to put a puck past Flyers goalie Antero Niittymaki.
"It's not that I don't care," Crosby said. "But after you miss so many, you kind of become numb and just try to go out there and put it in."
Which Crosby did, beating Niittymaki on the glove side to make the Penguins' 5-4 shootout victory at the Wachovia Center possible, although their two points weren't secure until goalie Marc-Andre Fleury stopped Simon Gagne -- who had scored Philadelphia's first two goals -- on the Flyers' final try.
Erik Christensen and Evgeni Malkin had failed to beat Niittymaki, while Fleury had denied Jeff Carter and Peter Forsberg, before Crosby got his turn in the shootout. And responded the way a big-time player is supposed to in high-stakes situations.
"It was nice for one to finally go in," he said.
Timely, too, because his goal stretched the Penguins' current roll to 10-0-2, improved their record to 28-17-9 and moved them into a tie with Ottawa for fourth place in the Eastern Conference.
"They might be the hottest team in the league right now," Gagne said.
Crosby's goal also enhanced a compelling by-the-numbers case for the Penguins' chances of getting into the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 2001.
Tampa Bay earned the eighth spot in the East with 92 points last season. Having earned 65 in their first 54 games, the Penguins need just 28 to exceed that total.
That would entail nothing more than playing .500 -- going 14-14, or its equivalent -- the last 28 games. Given that they have taken 22 of 24 possible points from the past dozen games, that doesn't seem like an unrealistic objective. At least not if they can improve on their fairly lackluster, up-and-down performance of last night.
"I don't think we played a solid game," coach Michel Therrien said. "We're disappointed, but the most important thing is that we ended up leaving this building with two points."
For, he might have added, the fourth time in four tries this season. The Penguins, who have won a season series from the Flyers for just the second time in the past 13 seasons, are 7-0 against them in 2006-07.
Whether they can sweep Philadelphia -- something they've never accomplished -- is a matter of semantics because, while the Penguins will have taken all eight games if they win March 4 at Mellon Arena, the Flyers did pick up a point for extending the game beyond regulation last night.
Jordan Staal gave the Penguins a 1-0 lead at 9:35 of the first period by chipping in a Christensen rebound for his 20th of the season just as a tripping minor to Flyers defenseman Derian Hatcher was expiring.
Gagne got that goal back for the Flyers during a power play at 11:57, when he threw a shot past Fleury from along the goal line to the right of the net, and added another man-advantage goal with 72 seconds left in the period to put Philadelphia up, 2-1.
Michel Ouellet pulled the Penguins even at 12:56 of the second, as he pulled in a pass from Ryan Whitney and charged to the net before sticking a shot between Niittymaki's pads for his 12th. Fleury picked up the second assist.
Fleury preserved the tie by denying Michael Richards on a short-handed breakaway 56.6 seconds before the second intermission, and his teammates rewarded him with two goals in a 30-second span early in the third.
Mark Recchi put the Penguins up, 3-2, at 34 seconds by backhanding his own rebound past Niittymaki while falling to the ice, and Christensen scored from the front lip of the crease at 1:04.
The outcome seemed fairly secure at that point, but Mike Knuble made it 4-3 at 5:58, then tipped in an Alexei Zhitnik shot with 84 seconds left in regulation to force overtime.
"They kept coming, and I think we panicked just a little bit," Christensen said. "It's not like we sat back and said, 'Ah, that's the game,' but they bumped it up a level of intensity and we didn't match it."
But they did survive, and Crosby's shootout goal allowed them to head to Toronto for a game tomorrow night with a couple of critical, if not richly deserved, points.
"It's been a long time since we had a bad game," Therrien said. "Tonight was a bad game. But the positive thing is that, even if you're not at your best, if you're capable of winning at this time of year, it's a good sign."
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(Dave Molinari can be reached at DWMolinari@Yahoo.com.)
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