Penguins Notebook: Finger still hampering Fleury
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Sidney Crosby tries to knock the puck out of the air against Capitals goalie Jose Theodore in the first period.
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Marc-Andre Fleury got his new catching glove, the one that provides more room for his broken left ring finger. He heated it to try to make it more pliable, then tried it out on the ice yesterday morning.
Afterward, though, the Penguins' No. 1 goaltender reported that nothing he did with the bright white, new piece of equipment was going to allow him to play last night.
"It's not the glove; it's mostly the finger," Fleury said after he was on the ice for about 25 minutes before the team held its morning skate.
He missed his third game in a row.
Many of Fleury's teammates were on the ice before he came off, so he got peppered with shots.
Coach Dan Bylsma said forwards Max Talbot (undisclosed injury) and Pascal Dupuis (facial injury) remain day to day. Talbot skated for 20 minutes before the morning skate.
Penguins center Evgeni Malkin edged Washington winger Alex Ovechkin for the NHL scoring title last season -- 113 points to 110 -- and went on to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP as he helped the Penguins win the Stanley Cup. Ovechkin then beat out Malkin to win the Hart Trophy as regular-season MVP.
Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau told this story about Ovechkin from the final couple of weeks of the regular season:
"Those individual awards were great, but when you watched him in [Las] Vegas [at the NHL awards ceremony] last year, all he talked about was winning the one other trophy [the Stanley Cup]. They're nice, but it's not what runs his show.
"As a matter of fact, I had a talk about that last year. I said, 'Listen, I want to play you a little bit more, see if you can't catch Malkin.' He said, 'I don't care about that. I only care about one trophy.' That was probably with about eight or 10 games to go."
First Published January 22, 2010 12:00 am
