James Neal, Useless No Longer -- Penguins Win OT Thriller in Tampa

One of my best friends dubbed James Neal "useless" about 10 games into his career with the Penguins. As in James Useless Neal. I, too, was disappointed in the guy. At first he seemed weak, easily taken off his line and he checked with utter indifference. Plus, he didn't score. In fact, he seemed to get flustered around the net, to hesitate a moment too long before shooting, to just not have the quick hands and killer instinct you want from a goal scorer.

Over time, he developed the other parts of his game -- he uses his size to his advantage, finishes his checks, and establishes position. In short, he has become a great overall player and through the first four games of the post-season, he has been the most physical presence on the ice not named Brooks Orpik.

But fans, myself included, want Neal to score. And I'm fairly certain that Ray Shero traded Alex Goligoski to the Stars to get Neal (and Matt Niskanen), because Neal is a scoring winger. Heck, the Penguins -- in the absence of Sid and Geno -- have a ton of guys who are great role players, but not pure scorers. I believe Neal has been pressing around the net, gripping his stick with a vulcan death grip and his desire to score has been counter-productive. The other parts of his game are nice, but we want goals -- big, fat, juicy, game winning goals. And he knows that.

Last night's wrister from the boards that whizzed past an unsuspecting Dwayne Roloson might be just the medicine Neal needs to go on a tear. I actually believe that the dam has burst and we'll see more production from him in terms of points. He is a man who looks like the weight of the world has just been lifted from his shoulders. That's got to be good for his game.

Other random thoughts about this playoff series:

At this time of year, in fact at all times of the year, the outcome of games seems to come down to Marc-Andre Fleury. The team feeds off Fleury, particularly without Sid out there leading the way. When Flower gets off to a good start, makes a great save early, they all feed off of it and get stronger as a result. When he has a shaky start (like Friday night), instead of rising up to give their goalie a lift, they all falter. You can pretty much tell how a game is going to go within the first five minutes of the first period, just by watching Flower. Here's hoping he's a brick wall in net at noon on Saturday, so the Pens can put these guys away and move on.


I saw a stat on FoxSports, er, excuse me Root Sports the other night that Brooks Orpik averages about 2.7 hits per game in the regular season, but he averages somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.8 hits per game in the post-season. How fantastic is that?


Dear Tampa Bay,
Get as loud as you want. We love it.
Sincerely,
Max Talbot
Max is a big time player. The Penguins, I would point out, are 11-1 in the post-season when Max has a goal. The guy has the Midas touch.


Has anybody had a bigger series than Arron Asham? Like Talbot, he has a freaky ability to raise his game in the post-season. I think this is precisely why Shero brought him on board. He has three huge goals in this series and constantly goes to net with authority.


Oh wait, I thought of somebody who has had a bigger series than Asham -- Martin St. Louis. He has six points in four games and has single-handedly kept the Lightning in games. Every time I see #26 on the ice for Tampa, my blood pressure spikes. Even though everybody in the building knows that St. Louis is the Bolts best chance to win, he still gets loose around the net. He's got amazing speed, tremendous hands and is maybe the most elusive player in the NHL. If that guy wasn't playing in Tampa, if he played for a Canadian team or in a city like Pittsburgh or Detroit, he'd be a rock star, mentioned in the same breath with Sid and Ovie, Pavel Datsyuk and Daniel Sedin.


At some point today, I will write several love sonnets to Zbynek Michalek. What rhymes with 'cleaner?' Does anybody remember the rules of iambic pentameter?


Steven Stamkos' stat line for this series -- 4 games, 5 shots on goal, 0 goals, 1 assist, and a minus-1 rating. Last night, he didn't even get a single shot on Fleury, that's how much the Pens defense has taken him out of this series. Welcome to the post-season, kid.


Was it just me or did those little drums they passed out to the fans in Tampa Bay on Monday night sound like vuvuzelas? Man, that is a sound I so did not miss. Perhaps there were rogue FIFA vuvuzelas in the house? In addition to the silly drums, that is.

Fleury Leads the Way in Game 1, Pens Best Lightning

A handful of years ago, before the Penguins 2008-2009 Stanley Cup Victory, fans were whining and carping about Marc-Andre Fleury -- that he wasn't any good, that he'd never be any good and that the organization should ship away the overall No. 1 pick from the 2003 draft. Okay, not all fans, but there was a vocal group, a minority I hoped, who were foolishly impatient and virulently anti-Fleury. I still hear grumbles from time to time from some fringe wing-nuts about Fleury, but mostly I ignore them because you can never try to bring reason to a sports argument with an idiot.

I have this theory about hockey and I may be just as full of it as the Flower-bashers, but the theory goes: the closer you play to the net, the longer it takes to mature, the longer it takes to get to your game, as it were. A winger or centerman can come in and be good right away. Not that he'll have a complete game, mind you, but the positives he brings to the ice are so apparent that everybody forgives a couple of holes in his game. This is especially true with hockey-savants like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal, but even for ordinary talents, you can see their upside more readily than you can in a defenseman or goalie.

As to the defensemen, again, I'm going to stick with a Pittsburgh example -- Rob Scuderi. There was a season (2005-2006, I think) when I actually audibly groaned whenever Scuds took the ice. I had very few nice things to say about him. His game was painful to watch sometimes, but he kept chipping away at his game, kept improving in little ways, ways that probably only he and his teammates and coaches could see at first. He learned how to play his position, how to position his body to best help Fleury, how to maneuver incoming snipers off of their preferred lines of approach, how to work in tandem with the other defender, how to time throwing his body in front of pucks. By the time the Penguins made it to their first Stanley Cup Finals appearance following the 2007-2008 season, Scuds and Brooks Orpik were the team's best pure defensemen. A year later, when the team actually won the Stanley Cup, nobody was bigger on the back end than Rob Scuderi.

And if it felt like we had to be patient with Scuds, even more patience is needed with a brilliant net-minder. As good as Fleury was when the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, he's been even better this year. Last night, through a first period when the Lightning tilted the ice in his direction (at a pretty steep slope mind you), Flower stood tall and withstood the marauding hordes.

There were so many Tampa players in Fleury's personal space, it looked like the Lightning called a team meeting in the crease. But he denied them time and again, managing to swat pucks away that he couldn't get a bead on, blocking pucks with his ass, blocking them with the back of his knee, pulling pucks out of the air like a left-fielder, smiting all 14 shots on net that came his way in the first period.

That's not to say he didn't play a brilliant game for all 60 minutes, but the Penguins got to their game in the second period (as coach Bylsma likes to say), putting the pressure on Roloson, getting out in transition quickly, not allowing multiple rushes at Fleury, but limiting the chances per possession.

So many players contributed. Brooks Orpik, I believe, got in Steven Stamkos' head when he crushed him on the very first shift of the game. Stamkos only got one shot on net and only attempted four shots total. Call it the Orpik Effect.

James Neal was likewise finishing people off all over the ice, then made a spectacular pass to Alex Kovalev to finally break the scoreless tie.

Seconds later, Arron Asham got a great goal that was the fruit of sticking to the puck like white on rice.

You don't win a playoff game without a holistic team effort, but nobody stood taller than the Flower in Game 1.






[All photos courtesy of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review]

Top 5 Reasons for the Penguins Hot Streak

The hottest team in hockey has not only the hottest forward in hockey in the other-worldly Sidney Crosby, but also tremendous chemistry, and coach Dan Bylsma has the Midas touch of late in stringing lines together. Doesn't matter who is out of the line up, he just moves people around and plugs them in and it seems to work. They are going to have to lose a game sooner or later, but so far, they've been outworking teams and when you combine that kind of consistent work with the kind of talent they have, you end up with an 11 game winning streak.

The top five reasons the Pens are clicking right now:

1. Flower is a pistol. I have no idea what was wrong with him the first month of the season. He looked distracted. Like he was thinking about pie, rather than the game in front of him. Maybe it wasn't pie. Maybe it was mousse. Whatever it was, he let in soft goal after soft goal. And usually very early in the game. I have no idea what that was about or, more importantly, how he fixed it. But fixed it seems to be. He started to turn a corner in mid-November and seems to me that he's been getting better and better ever since. For the season, his goals against average is 2.33, which matches his career best of 2.33 in 2007-2008 (when he helped carry the team to their first Stanley Cup Final appearance), but if you look at his stats for just the last month or so when he started to really bring it, he's allowed just 22 goals in 13 games (starting in mid-November.) That's a goals against average of 1.69.

I've missed only a handful of games in the Marc-Andre Fleury era and I can say that it's not just numbers. When he's going good, the team seems to really feed off of it. If he makes just one spectacular save in a game, they seem to rise up collectively around him. Memory is a funny thing, but of the Pens 2008-2009 Stanley Cup run, I remember a few moments, a few snapshots from that post-season, that feel as though they happened 15 minutes ago and the clearest memory I have of that post-season run is Flower stoning Alex Ovechkin on a break away in the Capitals series. I believe the series, and maybe the whole magical post-season run, turned on that one save. Everything works better when Flower is hot.
2. Kris Letang and Crazy Eyes Killer. The defensive pairings are all working really well. Deryk Engelland is the muscle that Alex Gologoski needs to balance him; Paul Martin and Zbynek Michalek are just steady-eddies together. But the stars of the show, are the two best defensemen the Pens have, and they're paired together.

Crazy Eyes Killer, a/k/a Brooks Orpik, is about as good a defenseman as you might find in the league. He's a heavy, an enforcer, and I don't mean that in the way that those terms are generally used in hockey parlance. He's not a fighter, not an instigator and not one to take foolish penalties. Through 24 games, he has just 18 penalty minutes. (The league's biggest wanker, Sean Avery, leads the NHL in penalty minutes with 103. Think about that.) No, Orpik is so solid, so steady that he's able to be tremendously physical without ever playing dirty or taking cheap shots. And he is the last man on earth I would want hitting me along the boards. Ouch.

All of which frees up Letang to work his magic. Letang is the most elegant skater on the ice most of the time. He's fast. He's got a quick release and a knack for scoring -- it's no mistake that Sid feeds the puck out to him. In the past, Letang has been paired with other offensive-minded defensemen, which I think tied his hands, forced him to cover a bit. With Orpik out there being the Yin to Letang's Yang, he's blossoming into one of the best scoring defensemen in the league. They go together like Butch and Sundance. That's some high praise indeed.

3. Paul Martin. Actually, I should have just called this one Ray Shero because Shero seems to make all the right moves in the off-season. He's always looking to tweak the team without disrupting the core of it.

All of which brings me to Martin, the defensive presence they have missed since Rob Scuderi left. In fact, I think the team has sorely missed the defensive pairing of Scuderi and USS Hal Gill since the Cup year. The teams was weaker defensively last year -- anybody remember Sergei Gonchar standing there like a statue as the Montreal Canadiens just blew by him at the blue line? Then they lost Mark Eaton, one of the more reliable defensemen, to free agency, making the defense even weaker. They had recalled Knuckles Engelland from Wilkes-Barre and then Shero went to work, his biggest moves being to bring in Martin and Michalek.

It took some time for them to work together as Michalek was out with some injuries, but they have developed real chemistry and trust together. Plus, Byslma & Co. fixed the anemic power play unit by putting Martin at point. He's a very straight forward kind of player, not one to dither around in the defensive zone considering a hundred and one options as time drains away from the man-advantage. Nope, guy puts his head up and just brings the puck up. It's made a huge, huge difference.

4. Depth.Without Jordan Staal for the whole season, without Aran Asham for a chunk of games, without Michalek for a chunk of games, without Evgeni Malkin, without Mike Comrie (who it was thought would be a great wingman for Sid), they just keep on chugging. Mark Letestu and Chris Conner are playing themselves into starting spots even when Malkin and Staal are back. But what to do with Craig Adams? Mike Rupp? These are good problems for a coach to have -- to have too many players and not enough starting spots.

5. Sid. You can never write too much about what Crosby does on the ice. Sure, he scores a ton and he's on a real tear during this winning streak. And he feeds perfect tape-to-tape passes to his linemates. He handles face offs. He contributes on the penalty kill. He's made a home for himself beside the night, fighting to get dirty goals. Only somehow, when Sid makes them, they're spectacular. He's shooting the puck more from outside. Every time I turn on a game, I marvel at something else he does. Every time.

Wednesday night versus the Toronto Maple Leafs, he broke his stick with a Leaf bearing straight down on Fleury. So he just got right in the way, and was hitting the ice to block a shot with his body, which forced the Leaf to go around him and took him off line. I don't even think the guy got a shot on net. When the best offensive player in the game sells out like that, how can his teammates not?