By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Peter Diana/Post-Gazette
Sidney Crosby celebrates a goal by Marian Hossa in the first period of Game 3.
The Flyers are clearly just trying to avoid playing the Detroit Red Wings in the next round of these Stanley Cup playoffs, so it's kind of a shame they've had to be so dramatic about it.
This fast-fading hockey chapter is overwritten in blood, and whether it's clotting in Kimmo Timonen's foot or spilling out of Braydon Coburn's face, Philadelphia's vengeance-themed hockey team is in a much messier situation than might have existed without those gruesome injuries to its superb defensemen.
All that said, no amount of perfectly located effort or plasma was going to derail these Penguins, whose pristine playoff run goes on stage again tonight at the Wachovia Center for Flying Elbows, a k a the Kate Smith Interactive Museum and Soft Pretzel Emporium.
"You have to ride this train as long as you can," conductor Petr Sykora was saying in the Penguins' dressing room yesterday. "Something very special is happening with this team, this spring. The more we win, the more we want to win. I've been involved in a couple, three long playoff runs, and this one is very special.
"It's fun to be part of."
Sykora has in fact been to the Stanley Cup final thrice in previous lives with New Jersey and Anaheim, but he never has seen the kind of dominant momentum and precision put up for display game after game after game by his Penguins teammates.
But, really, who has?
That Michel Therrien's team has won 11 of its first 12 playoff games is not a story of random Penguingenuity, but rather a reliance and a belief in what they're doing and a delivery system for the necessary effort every single night.
"Everybody in this room has a different way of preparing," Sykora said. "But you can see it's more intense now. The quiet guys are quieter. The guys who talk a lot are talking a lot more. It really takes every single player preparing the best way he knows how to do what's happened here. Then, we just have to put it together, and I think we've done that."
When general manager Ray Shero executed the trade deadline deals for Marian Hossa and Pascal Dupuis and Hal Gill, it was clear Penguins management had deduced that this club was closer to the game's Holy Grail in Sidney Crosby's third year than it had anticipated.
But not even Shero anticipated the heat of this playoff blitz.
"I think that people are coming to realize that this team is capable of playing great defense," Shero said in a Wachovia hallway after practice.
He was taking a crack at the question of what the difference is between his own best-case scenario and this near fantasy world the Penguins now inhabit. "I always thought our group of seven defensemen was somewhat underrated, but, when Hossa and Dupuis got here, they're very good defensive players, and that really kind of brought it out."
Shero attributed the 4-1 suffocation of the Flyers in Game 3 Tuesday night mainly to early goals by Ryan Whitney and Hossa, but, even after R.J. Umberger answered when he put a rebound behind Marc-Andre Fleury and Ryan Malone went off for hooking soon thereafter, the Penguins calmly killed what seemed like a fateful penalty on precise efforts by Rob Scuderi, Max Talbot, Adam Hall, et al.
As hard as they are to play against on even terms, the Penguins are double difficult to deal with when they're protecting a lead, which again, in this singular playoff experience, is just about always. In fact, the Penguins have been behind for only 64 of their 727 postseason minutes as Game 4 of the Eastern Conference final looms tonight in South Philadelphia.
"We'll need to match that desperation that they'll have because there's no tomorrow for them," Crosby said evenly. "We can't afford to look ahead. We have a belief in ourselves right now. It's not like when you're doing something and you think it's right but you're not really sure. That's not the case with us. We're sure of what we're doing."
The Flyers spent yesterday contemplating some line shuffling, generally the last playoff act of a doomed ship. It's almost hard to imagine at this point what might keep the Penguins from arriving happily in Hockeytown next week with only one playoff loss.
"I like the mentality of these players," Therrien said. "They're never satisfied. I believe right now they're starting to get recognized as winners."
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
First published on May 15, 2008 at 12:00 am
No comments:
Post a Comment