Collier: Penguins could use miracle at this point
Share with others:
Peter Diana, Post-Gazette
Goalie Marc-Andre Fleury can only watch as the Senators' Dean McAmmond scores in the first period last night at Mellon Arena.
The first hockey playoff game in this town in six years started just after 6 p.m. yesterday, a rare burst of NHL dinner theatre, and when Game 3 of these Eastern Conference quarterfinals ended some three hours later, one truth stood out from 100 others.
The Penguins, so often throughout their history in need of a miracle, sometimes just to exist, are going to need another.
A miracle on ice.
Wait, is that taken?
The Ottawa Senators, maybe you've noticed, are generally superior to Ray Shero's overachieving flock, and even if these Penguins stretch this ordeal out to six or seven games, even if they win it -- one might say miraculously -- that judgment will stand.
A Game 7 would be interesting mostly from the standpoint that if the Penguins continue to curl into the fetal position offensively at the current rate, they'll get exactly five shots that night in Ottawa.
"You can't shoot the puck around the wall all the time," said Penguins coach Michel Therrien, battling an acute seethe. "That should be your last option. Some guys want to do that like they see that as their only option."
Others, the coach mentioned, don't appear in the picture when he watches tape, and yet he remembers putting them on the ice.
What do you figure, vampires?
Most of those would figure to be defenders, because the open ice in front of Marc-Andre Fleury looks suspiciously like the back lot at "March of the Penguins."
"He's been solid all the way through," Penguins rookie Jordan Staal said of Fleury, "even in the first game. We just haven't been there for him."
It is of little solace to the Penguins that the Senators, ahead, 2-1, are leading this series in just about every statistical category up to and including stretcher rides. The dynamics of exactly nothing changed when Colby Armstrong drove his shoulder into the skull of Patrick Eaves behind the Penguins' net in the second period. Ottawa coached Bryan Murray called it "a fair hit, a hockey hit," Eaves was wheeled off, and then Maxime Talbot and Ottawa's Dean McAmmond slugged each other stupid for about two minutes.
All that represented, aside from a snapshot of the shoddy process by which the Penguins were turning a 1-0 lead into a 4-1 deficit, was proof that Talbot and McAmmond probably wouldn't be turning up on Kiss Cam for the rest of the series.
The more salient issue remained the disparity in shots in the first three games of this hair-pull. When Daniel Alfredsson whipped a shot past spectating Sergei Gonchar for Ottawa's third goal, the Senators were outshooting the Penguins in this series, 89-52. That was with nearly half the game remaining.
After three fully formed episodes, Ottawa has ripped 99 shots on the net to the Penguins' 66. The Penguins had 26 in Game 1, 21 in Game 2, 19 last night.
"I think it's just a matter of getting the puck in deep," said Staal, who failed to get a single shot last night after scoring goals in the first two playoff games of his NHL life. "It's about getting the puck behind the net, behind the defense. We're not doing it right now and I don't know why.
"It's not very difficult to shoot the puck off the boards and go crash, but we're not doing that. That's what was going on in the second period. It's either just not there or it's too little, too late. Their 'D' is doing a good job of holding us up at the blue line, but we've got to start chipping it in."
From the first shift of this series, the Penguins have been making so many mistakes in their end and at center ice that any coherent offense is nearly impossible. Ottawa tied Game 3 on a goal that typified the Penguins' predicament. Fleury had just stoned Eaves' uncontested blast from 20 feet when traffic converged on him like four cars running a four-way stop. Brooks Orpik knocked Ottawa's Tom Preissing into the cage just as McAmmond swiped the biscuit passed the toppling goaltender.
"I guess," sighed Therrien when asked if that looked like a legitimate goal to him.
Didn't matter, there were three more where that came from.
You can pretend Game 4 will proceed as if all things are equal, but the truth is elsewhere. In this series, the Penguins are 0-2 when they really stink, and somehow 1-0 when they stink only enough that Senators outshoot them, 37-21, and hit the post about 17 times.
First Published April 15, 2007 11:15 pm
