Staals see series from both sides

Monday, May 25, 2009
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Do you think they've been tempted yet, Henry and Linda Staal?

Do you imagine it's easy, sitting up there in Thunder Bay, Ontario, watching the first matchup of siblings in an NHL conference final in 35 years, wondering how competition suddenly became depredation?

PITTSBURGH - MAY 21: Jordan Staal(notes) #11 of the Pittsburgh Penguins battles against Eric Staal(notes) #12 of the Carolina Hurricanes during Game Two of the Eastern Conference Championship Round of the 2009 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Mellon Arena on May 21, 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jamie Sabau/Getty Images)

Their son's hockey team is torturing their other son's hockey team, which is the way they're compelled to view what the rest of us understand relatively dispassionately as this 3-0 headlock in which the Penguins are suffocating the Carolina Hurricanes.

Players being unavailable to the media yesterday, there was no way of knowing whether Jordan Staal had received any messages from anyone in Thunder Bay, maybe a parent or another of his three siblings, maybe just a text to the effect that it wouldn't be the end of the world, you know, if Jordan's big brother Eric were somehow able to score a goal in this series, maybe just one between here and next season.

"Play nice," moms like to say. Dads not so much, but they are capable of empathy.

Eric the elder was virtually spitting frustration after Game 3, the 6-2 Penguins victory here the other night, but he was trying to convert it to defiance.

"We've never been in this spot before but if I was to pick a team to try to come back, this would be the one because we've done it all year and we've done it in the playoffs," he said, being without a goal in the first three games of this series and the last three games of the Boston series. "We're going to work our butts off because that's what we do and we're going to go from there. We're going to take it 60 minutes at a time."

That has always been a prudent approach for the producers at 60 Minutes, but it remains seriously daunting for these Hurricanes. In 180 minutes of hockey in this series, they've led for fewer than 14, thanks in no small part to the Penguins' principle defenders against Eric Stall: Rob Scuderi, Hal Gill and Jordan Staal. To this point, the 21-year-old Jordan is his brother's keeper.

Twenty-four-year-old Eric scored 40 goals in the NHL's regular season, and even with this six-game slump came into Game 3 as the league's fourth-leading playoff goal scorer with nine. But as Carolina's lead horse, his performance has been a glaring contrast to Penguins forces Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, one having been more dazzling than the next.

When this series was about to start, someone asked Jordan in the Penguins dressing room whether the battle with his brother was a bigger deal to those outside the family than between the siblings.

"One of us is going to the Stanley Cup finals," Jordan said evenly. "It's a pretty big deal."

It's not right if this series is remembered more for what Eric failed to do than for what Jordan accomplished. Jordan won the opening faceoff of the series from his brother, not to mention just about everything between that moment and this. Had not Jordan's shot on goal in Game 2 slid just wide of the pipe, he'd have authored an offensive highlight equal in skill and difficulty to anything presented by Malkin and Crosby.

But Jordan's biggest contribution has been playing defense the way Penguins coach Dan Bylsma wants it played -- in the offensive zone.

"I'm not sure that we've been all that successful [against Eric]," Bylsma said yesterday. "He's been driving the net. There have been times when he had a shot in the first period there, and had a great shot. You know, it's not that we haven't held our breath a few times when he's had the puck, but when you can play in the offensive zone, and when you can wear teams down, it makes it harder for them to attack when they do get the puck.

"When we're playing our best, we're playing in the offensive zone. They get the puck, and they force the bad dump or we force the bad dump because they don't have enough energy to get back down the ice. That limits the skill players' time and space with the puck. It limits their energy when they do have the puck. That's one of the keys when you force them to get to the offensive zone, that's when you can play your best defense. And the best place to keep their good players is in the defensive zone."

There's little of that with which Hurricanes boss Paul Maurice would disagree, but he wasn't as cautious with traditional defensive compliments.

"[Jordan] Staal's line clearly has a more defensive bent to their game," Maurice said at a morning conference. "He's a fine player as well."

There will soon be four young Staals in the NHL simultaneously, and they'll all be fine players. But it makes for some difficult viewing in Thunder Bay.

Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com. More articles by this author
First published on May 25, 2009 at 12:00 am