1) Last night was undoubtedly the best game of the three Stanley Cup Final contests thus far. For one, both teams scored. There was lots of hitting and scoring chances. It was far more wide open than the first 2 games. The last point is why the penguins prevailed. The RedWings allowed the penguins to play 'their game'. The run and gun style significantly helps the penguins. Pittsburgh showed they can not stomach a tight checking close to the vest style.2) Very impressed with the play of Tomas Holmstrom and Brooks Oprik. Both were warriors in every sense of the word last evening. They can play on our team any day! Even though last night's game was played exactly like Pittsburgh likes, they still were far from being the better team. The game could have gone either way. If not for stellar goaltending of M-A Fleury the Wings probably would be ahead 3-0, despite the Penguin-like tempo.
3) Which brings us to the goaltending issue. Can we stop the nonsense about Osgood? Some were anointing him MVP based upon his stats, not about his actual worth to his team. Sure he did his part to win games 1-2, but he was hardly the primary reason. Last night illustrated this clearly. In our opinion through 3 games: Osgood was better in game 1. Game 2 was a toss up, and Fleury was better last night. Confirming our opinion that if you exchanged each goalie onto the other team it wouldn't effect the end result of this series.
4) So where do we go from here? We believe that in Game 5 the Red Wings will do all they can to have the game be played on their terms. Expect it to be far less wide open. Expect the Penguins to get frustrated when they fail to score easily. In essence we believe we will see a repeat of games 1-2. We see last night as an aberration, not the beginning of a new trend. Make no mistake, the Red Wings are light years better right now than the Penguins. The series will/should end in Mo-town, next week. Despite what the talking heads at the network want you to believe, it is NOT a series!
3 comments:
Not a series? No way can you say you don't have an anti Pittsburgh bias! We maybe didn't blow the redwings out, but we for the first time looked like the team thats been winning all year. The way you make it out is if the redwings chose to play like that. maybe they had no choice because of how we played, huh?
1)Ron: We can assure you have NO anti-Pitt bias here at FAUXRUMORS. We pledge no allegiances to any team. We have done positive and negative posts here over the past 3 years on almost every NHL team
2) We write what we see, and what our opinions are based upon those observations. We invite opposing view points, but you can take it to the bank that we have NO agenda other than to have fun and write/share our opinions with our readers!
How do you come up with the determination that game two was a toss up as to which goalie played better?
Its hard to find an argument that Osgood did not play better - in that he let in zero goals and Fleury let some in.
That said, would Osgood have let in more than Fleury if they faced the same shots? We can never know. Its only speculation.
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