Sunday, June 01, 2008
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Matt Freed/Post-Gazette
Marian Hossa, left, gave the Penguins an early 1-0 lead on a power-play goal. It would be the highlight of the night.
Brooks Orpik and Jiri Hudler, the Red Wings' fourth- or fifth- or sixth-line center, were in the circle to the left of Marc-Andre Fleury with their backs to the Penguins' goaltender, warring over one square yard of Mellon ice.
When the puck slid from Darren Helms into their desperate stick-banging dance, with barely two minutes gone in the third period last night, Hudler's blade found it first, and that seemed to trigger in Hudler an instant recognition of one of hockey's offensive commandments, specifically the one that says a shot on goal is never a bad play.
So he backhanded it blindly toward Fleury, who was slamming his left shoulder in the near post just in case.
Just in case one random rubber disc in a 60-minute shooting gallery might flutter to the only spot where it could do some damage. Just in case.
Hudler's shot went to that spot.
And through that spot.
The damage?
Irreparable.
"We had one or two chances right there to bring the puck out," Michel Therrien said 10 minutes after Hudler's goal beat the Penguins, 2-1, and turned Detroit's advantage in the Stanley Cup final into a three-games-to-one stranglehold. "This is a good team, a very good team. Their fourth line scored the goal that won the game. So what can you say?"
You can say that it's all the more remarkable then that the Penguins' gifted front-line stars, Sidney Crosby and Marian Hossa and Evgeni Malkin and Sergei Gonchar, could not manage the goal that might have tied it, even given 86 seconds of 5-on-3 hockey seven minutes after Hudler's goal.
"That's tough to explain," Therrien said. "We didn't execute very well."
Matt Freed/Post-Gazette
A dejected Marc-Andre Fleury gives up the go-ahead goal to Jiri Hudler midway through the third period last night at Mellon Arena.
What isn't so tough is that Hudler's shot is the very kind of thing that ends the kind of improbable streaks the Penguins brought to Game 4. They were long overdue to lose at home, where they hadn't lost in regulation since Feb. 13 and where they were 9-0 in the playoffs. They were long overdue to lose despite scoring first after winning all 11 times they jumped ahead in this postseason. Fleury was way, way overdue to get beat in this building, where he hadn't lost in regulation since Nov. 21, 2007.
"I still have so much confidence in all of these guys in every situation," said center Adam Hall, another fourth-line center who put a winner home in this series. "It's not 3-1 from our perspective. There's only one game, and it's Monday night, and that's the way we have to think about it."
Early in the second period with the Red Wings operating a recharged power play, Mikael Samuelsson wound up from the far side of the left circle and rifled a shot that seemed to disappear for a moment.
Without changing its angle all that dramatically and without changing Fleury's posture by even a twitch, the puck reappeared atop the crossbar and ran across it like a squirrel, diving to the ice on the other end of the cage. Hockey players who are largely undeterred by concussions, severe scalp lacerations, eyes swollen shut, ankles swollen into cantaloupes, certainly aren't afraid of squirrels, and yet from that point forward in Game 4, both teams seemed skittish for probably the first time in this Stanley Cup final.
An extremely cautious, absolutely scoreless second period ensued, with both teams generating a couple of decent scoring chances but remaining primarily in a posture to avoid mistakes, especially the mistake.
It is June, after all, and the stakes can't be higher.
Fleury and Chris Osgood, by notable contrast, actually looked more relaxed as the period wore on. Osgood stopped Crosby and Jordan Staal in the same sequence. Osgood stopped all seven shots he saw in the second. Both teams wasted a power-play chance.
Though it has been pretty much impossible to overstate the import of the first goal in this series and, in the Penguins' case, in all of the playoffs, most of the 17,000 plus refrained from heading for the parking lots when Hossa stuffed Gonchar's rebound inside the right post for a 1-0 lead less than three minutes after the puck was dropped.
Therrien's team simply plays much differently and confidently when it's ahead, and the same can be said for Mike Babcock's team. Detroit brought to Game 4 a 12-1 record when it scored first, so Hossa's power-play goal from Gonchar and Crosby at 2:51 of the first period, just 40 seconds after Dallas Drake went off for roughing Ryan Whitney, was its own little monument.
Thus it was no small matter when Nicklas Lidstrom nullified the first goal by slamming the second past Fleury at 7:06 of the first. Pascal Dupuis had just left the penalty box after serving a cross-checking minor but was not yet fully back into the play when Lidstrom's whistler from the left point tied the score.
The Red Wings finished the first period with 14 shots, an ominous total for Fleury. The Penguins had a reasonably healthy nine. When it ended Detroit had 30 shots and had 22 others blocked. The worst of them might have been Hudler's. You can be sure the Penguins feel that way.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
First published on June 1, 2008 at 12:45 am
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