Sid the Kid Still MIA; Red Wings Squeeze A Little Tighter

The Stanley Cup, presumably, is still safe and sound in its case in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

The old chalice gets out a lot, but there's time for it to be a shut-in, too.

Its rest, though, is about to be disturbed.

If Sidney Crosby doesn't get it going soon--and by soon I mean now--then the handlers of the Cup will trudge down to its case, lug it out, and pack it away in its metal trunk for a trip to Pittsburgh.

Wednesday morning, as a matter of fact. Day after tomorrow.

For the Cup must be on hand for Game Four at Mellon Arena, just in case, if the Penguins don't find a way to snatch Game Three on Tuesday night.

This is when the Cup gets disturbed and flown from city to city, pending the outcomes of the Finals games.

But the Penguins can grant the most treasured and storied trophy in sports a couple more days rest if they can somehow will the hockey gods to turn their fortunes around soon.

Once again, soon means now.

NBC, the network that, around this time of the year, must stand for Nothing But Crosby, must feel like they just planned and threw a party for a guest of honor who never showed up.

The Detroit Red Wings, once again at the Finals, are using their famous cephalopodic heritage to turn Sid the Kid into Sid the Squid.

No points thru two games, Crosby has, after the Red Wings' 3-1 win in Game Two, an eerily similar experience to Game One.

To wit: the Red Wings' Justin Abdelkader, who 24 hours earlier--almost literally--scored his first ever professional goal of any kind at 2:46 of the third period, scored again, at 2:47 of the third period.

Both goals gave the Red Wings a 3-1 lead in games where the one-goal margin looked about as safe as room temperature mayonnaise.

I'm not sure where one goes to get some puck luck, but the Penguins sure better find some of it, and soon.

Altogether now: soon means now.

The Red Wings, right now, seemed to have stored away a cache of this puck luck when no one was looking, waiting to break it out on a rainy day.

In Game One, it was the trickiness of the Joe Louis Arena end boards and Pens goalie Marc-Andre Fleury's backstabbing leg pads that did Pittsburgh in to the tune of two goals.

In Game Two, the goalposts looked at the Penguins shooters, looked at Red Wings goalie Chris Osgood, and decided that the only things getting behind Ozzie that night would be their support.

The pucks sure didn't, save one.

Bill Guerin hit a goalpost, in the second period. Dead-on the iron.

Crosby hit a goalpost in the third period. But that wasn't all.

Crosby's shot caromed across the goal crease, perilously close to the red line and Osgood's skate, somehow ended up back onto Sid's stick, and he zinged it back into the pile of bodies that had now gathered.

Funny--that's the kind of play that a scorer like Crosby routinely buries. He need only have lifted the puck a few inches, and he would have been on the board and off the schneide.

Instead, NBC has to wait for a Game Five (not so fast) to throw another party for Sid, to see if he graces everyone with his presence.

Games Three and Four are on Versus, the only TV network I know of whose name is also a preposition.

Here's a preposition for you: by.

As in, shouldn't Crosby have scored by now?

"You see him everywhere," Red Wings coach Mike Babcock said at Media Day on Friday, referring to the NHL's pumping of Crosby in its TV ads. "Sometimes I wonder if they know that we won it (the Stanley Cup) last year."

Of course, it's still relative early. Crosby could still go off, and before you know it, this series is tied up.

Could happen.

But the Red Wings have done a masterful job, so far, of bottling up The Kid.

The other Pens superstar, Evgeni Malkin, has a goal and an assist. And a fight.

Frustration boiled over at the end of Sunday night's game, with Malkin asking Detroit's Henrik Zetterberg for a dance.

As is usually the case when two non-fighters scrap, it wasn't much. But it did signal Malkin's frame of mind, and of course the JLA crowd ate it up.

Osgood was phenomenal, again, in the Red Wings' net.

I don't have a vote for the Conn Smythe Trophy (playoff MVP), but I have a hunch that Osgood's name is about to be associated with it.

Barring a collapse, the Red Wings will win their second straight Stanley Cup, fifth in twelve years, and 12th in team history. And Osgood, who's been amazing in every round, will be the hands down Conn Smythe winner.

There's no one else even close, frankly.

Ozzie's counterpart, Fleury, is becoming a little goat-ish.

There were the end boards hijinks on Saturday, and Abdelkader's knuckle-puck shot on Sunday fluttered over the goalie's shoulder like a butterfly.

Those are the kinds of goals you simply cannot give up when the stakes are this high.

They say that a best-of-seven series doesn't truly break out until a team wins a game on the road. And, traditionally, Game Three is the toughest for the team that's leading 2-0 to get.

When I spoke to the NHL Network's Larry Murphy after Sunday's morning skate, he told me that Game Two, to him, is the most important game of a series because it's the first game when one of the two teams is facing any adversity.

Using that logic, the Penguins face a ton of it right now.

If they lose Sunday, Murphy told me, "Then the Penguins have to do whatever they can to make some sort of series out of this."

Having the NHL's Chosen One chip in with a goal or two might be nice, if you're a Penguins fan.

Maybe Detroit fans could send Crosby a post card.

Having a great time at The Finals, Sid. Wish you could be here!

Of The Four Recent Red Wings Victims, Pens Most Likely To Be Heard From Again

Sidney Crosby is gone for the summer. School’s out. His final exam performance wasn’t good enough to win the Stanley Cup. And all his young Pittsburgh Penguins schoolmates – those early-20-somethings who did their best to make the Red Wings’ lives spooky during this year’s Cup Finals – are gone with him, perhaps to gather together and raise a cold...soda (Sid’s only 20, don’t forget) and figure out a way to return to the championship round next spring.

The Penguins have the goods to do it, you know.

The Red Wings have sent four teams from the inferior Eastern Conference home for the summer since 1997.

There were the heavily-favored Philadelphia Flyers of ’97 – a big, supposedly fearsome team with a line called the Legion of Doom: wingers John LeClair and Mikael Renberg, and center Eric Lindros. How would the less physical (again, supposedly) Red Wings handle such beasts coming at them in droves throughout the Finals?

Easy. Coach Scotty Bowman just made sure defenseman Nick Lidstrom was on the ice, along with Larry Murphy, whenever the frightening Legion of Doom climbed over the boards. Bowman chose the finesse of Lidstrom and Murphy over the brawn of Vladimir Konstantinov, surprising those experts who had the Flyers winning the series rather handily. And finesse totally shut down the Legion. In fact, that line was so ineffective, the Flyers could have been considered to have Legionnaire’s Disease. The Red Wings swept. The Flyers haven’t been back to the Finals since.

The next year, the surprising Washington Capitals, who seemed to need a couple of games to simply explain their presence in the Finals, were flicked away in four straight games, though it took a classic comeback in Game 2 to assure that. But those Caps were a collection of has-beens and not-quites and fluked their way into the Finals. That team was never heard from again.

In 2002, the Carolina Hurricanes showed up in the final round, and while everyone was still asking, “Who ARE these guys?” the ‘Canes had stolen Game 1 in Detroit in overtime. The Red Wings needed a late goal to force OT and three extra sessions to win Game 3 in Carolina. But the Cup was won in five games, just one over the minimum, and it took the Hurricanes four more years to return to the Finals (they won it in 2006), and today they cannot be considered a good bet to do it again anytime soon.

But these Penguins, these young, high-scoring, physical Penguins, are sure to break the string of vanquished Red Wings opponents in the Finals who are never heard from again. In fact, don’t be surprised if by next Memorial Day we’re around our grills talking about a Red Wings-Penguins rematch. And continue to not be surprised if the other team wins it in 2009.

There’s Crosby, for one. His initials match the Stanley Cup’s, and it will be oh-so-appropriate by the time Sid the Kid’s career is over with – sometime in the year 2025 or so. Crosby, though crammed down an unsuspecting public’s throats by the league and its minions and propaganda machine (which includes the National Broadcasting Company), is indeed the real deal. He’s as close to the next Wayne Gretzky as the NHL is ever going to get – both in terms of sheer talent and potential to win multiple championships.

Crosby is the face of the NHL -- the closest thing to Gretzky since, well, Gretzky

There’s goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who didn’t have the best game of his career in Game 6 but who was the reason there was a sixth game to begin with, thanks to his 55-save performance in Game 5’s epic battle. He’s young, as all the Penguins seem to be, and there’s no reason why he can’t keep it up. There’s Evgeni Malkin, who was terribly disappointing in the Finals but who was terrific leading up to it, and actually showed some signs late in the series against Detroit that he was just a player in a slump at the worst possible time, and was about to break out of it. It gives me the creeps to think of what he may have done in a Game 7.

No need for me to rattle off other names from the roster. The ages are the first thing you should look at if you happen upon a listing on the Internet. Lots of 20s under the age column.

These Penguins more closely remind me of the Edmonton Oilers of 1983 than any other Cup-losing team since then, if you want to know. The ’83 Oilers lost in the Finals to the New York Islanders, who by beating Edmonton had just won their fourth straight Cup. And those Oilers were basically the same core who went on to win five Cups in the next seven seasons. The same Oilers led by Gretzky. The Oilers of Paul Coffey, Mark Messier, Kevin Lowe, and the rest. The 2008 Penguins may have lost a Cup, but something tells me they gained a future.

If I was Pittsburgh coach Michel Therrien – who must dump some of the whining and crying if he’s to raise his game to another level, by the way – I’d be sure to remind my players of how they turned what was looking to be a snoozer of a Finals series into one that won’t be forgotten for a long time, if ever. I’d affix it into their skulls that after being shutout in Games 1 and 2 in Detroit, hardly anyone thought the series would last to even a fifth game. But the Pens, who had breezed through the first three rounds without any adversity or angst, picked themselves off the mat, won two of three, and suddenly a series had broken out. The TV ratings confirm how much interest there was, despite those first two games that were all Detroit.

Yes, I’d say these Pittsburgh Penguins did more than just scare the bejeebers out of the Red Wings and their fans during the past couple of weeks. They arrived. And they’re not just passing through, like so many of the pretenders who’ve fluked their way to the Finals and lost, never to be heard from again. Uh-uh.