Thursday, May 28, 2009
Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Two Teams, One Cup
Howdy hockey hombres: with two teams left and only one about to the same experience soul-crushing, season-ending agony the other 29 teams have already gotten used to, it's time to break down the Stanley Cup Finals. Last week we unearthed top-secret documents regarding the impendingly inevitable bankruptcy of the soon-to-be Las Vegas Coyotes: this week, I was planning on detailing my Rally Plan for the Blackhawks (Step #1: Get rid of Nick Lidstrom. Step #2: Off Datysuk. Step #3: Sit back and just cruise to easy victory), but after last night's OT "thriller" hockey fans are once again left with the most predictable matchup imaginable.
For those of you who have eaten bologna-and-cheese sandwiches every day since you were four, this is no doubt a great time in your life.
For those of you who, like me, have the attention spans of taurine-injected wolverines drowning in lava... not so much.
Regardless of what hockey fans wanted to see, we're left with the repeat of last year's Finals, provided you take the Penguins' third-best forward from last year and put him on Detroit, and give nothing in return. Other than that -- same series, slightly better players. And since, barring the Apocalypse, one team is guaranteed to lose, here's my annual Two Teams Enter, One Team Leaves Crying series breakdown.
Detroit Red Wings: Had a first-round bye before getting bloodied in Anaheim, then ran over the youngest team in hockey like Hogzilla runs over your petunia garden.
Why They're Awesome: Flawless positioning. Regardless of which five Red Wings are on the ice, you can watch an entire game/series/regular season/ two decades of dynastic excellence without once seeing two Red Wings skate within five feet of each other. No overloading one side of the boards, no 5-player scrums behind their own net. Nope, nothing but sheer intelligent positioning.
Combine that with where every Detroit player is --in the middle of the ice-- and you have a team that appears to be everywhere at the same time. Detroit controls the center of the ice like no other team in hockey, and it's because they don't get all concerned about harmless low-percentage plays like enemy shots from the board or the blue line. High-percentage plays from the top of the crease, enemy forwards skating through wide-open ice on the way to the net, successful toe-drags ten feet from the goalie --all extremely rare when you're playing against the Wings. Why none of the other 29 NHL teams employs a positional strategy like the Red Wings, I'll never know.
Just for fun, watch a terrible team like the Kings or Isles, and see how their players act without the puck: it's like watching a peewee soccer game. That's a lack of trust in your teammates right there.
The superior positioning creates open guys all over the ice, and in some cases the Red Wings are so adept at positioning it's like they've been given a 60-minute power play. This is when Detroit is simply unstoppable, and the "amazing skill" starts getting trumpeted over and over again. Detroit's skaters aren't all that much more skilled than the Isles in terms of sheer talent. But in terms of organizational togetherness, there's none better.
Why They Suck: Like a Russian chess master, Detroit loves to control the center of the board. But what happens to said master when you pick up his rook and shove it up his fat borscht-eating face? Without exception, the only way Detroit has been beaten in the playoffs in the past decade has been by a team willing to take the rules of hockey, acknowledge that they exist, and then slam a crowbar into the nearest Red Wing groin. The teams that give Red Wings fits --and remember that any time anyone beats the Red Wings, it's a 'huge upset' in that year's playoffs-- is always an over-the-top physical team of cheap shot artists, fighters, goons, thugs, clutchers and grabbers, baby rapists and ne'er-do-wells.
Detroit is the oldest, smallest team in the NHL, and a group of young, dumb, tough guys can ruffle their feathers. Sure, said 'upset' team would need to take their lumps in the form of tons of powerplay goals against, but the end result is, more often than not, a series victory and a sad-faced Red Wings team.
It also helps to have a young goalie stopping everything --although veteran teams often make goaltenders appear far better than they are with poor shot selection, the natural by-product of not wanting to skate through the crease for fear of getting high-sticked in the ribs. Young, aggressive teams that throw everything they have at the Red Wings' net seem to put Detroit on their heels, and take them off their offensive game quite nicely.
Pittsburgh Penguins: Powerplayed their way to sleep over the Flyers, were exposed momentarily by a hard-charging but seriously flawed Capitals team, before catching a piss-poor overmatched Canes team at the end of two 7-game series.
Why They're Awesome: No one has the offensive firepower of Crosby and Malkin, period. While several other teams scored more goals or have more balanced scoring from their forward lines, no team can roll out two superstuds like the Penguins, much less on the same line. That's the equivalent of the 49ers starting both Joe Montana and Steve Young under center simultaneously: simply ridiculous.
And while the two-stud system led to plenty of mediocre hockey earlier in the regular season, under new coaching phenom Dan Bylsma the Penguins are easily the tightest team in the East by a long shot.
The Pittsburgh defense, which relies heavily on Sergei Gonchar existing, gets the puck out of their own zone well and transitions into the offensive zone extremely quickly. Forwards that didn't backcheck in mid-December are now coming back to help out their d-men in times of need. And their goaltending is, somehow, underrated.
Why They Suck: Like those old-timey bicycles with the big wheel in front and the tiny wheel in the back, the Penguins are hopelessly overloaded in the front end, and far too reliant on three players to make the other 17 look halfway decent. Have just one or two of the Crosby-Malkin-Gonchar trio go down to injury, and the team simply falls apart: without Gonch in the second round, the Penguins were unable to eek out a victory against the Caps. Only when Sergei returned did, suddenly, Crosby and Malkin look unstoppable.
While much has been made of Hal Gill and Rob Scuderi as "shut-down" defensemen, their lack of footspeed and a transitional game does not bode well for the Penguins when they're facing a hard-charging group of skilled forwards like the Caps or Wings. These two guys can battle in the corner with the best of them, but having them recover from a Bill Guerin turnover at the enemy blue line is akin to watching two sumo wrestlers with sudden diarrhea struggle to get up and rush to the bathroom: not pretty.
A sustained, fearless swords-above-their-heads offensive attack can expose the Penguins (and pretty much any team in any sport in human history), and not just because of the slow lumbering d-men behind Gonchar, but because the Penguins' primary strength --Crosby and Malkin-- rarely play defense. You can tell they don't often backcheck because when they do, the announcers spend the next five minutes and three slo-mo replays pointing that out. It's the Mike Modano/Jaromir Jagr Syndrome: supremely skilled players can make amazing defensive plays when they want to, but more often than not choose to let their teammates get bloodied in the corners.
Tale of the Tape: Movable Object Versus Stoppable Force: Before the series was even decided, the Penguins were at a severe disadvantage --the Blackhawks are an extremely similar team to the Penguins, while the Canes resemble the Wings about as closely as your mom resembles Scarlett Johansson. Like the Pens, the Blackhawks have two young superstars carrying their offense, a defensive core over-reliant on two guys (Gonchar is better than either Seabrook or Keith individually), and with one truly physical crease-dumper in the form of Byflugien (i.e. Kunitz). It's almost as if the Red Wings were graced with a tune-up to the Finals with a free practice round --and they did pretty well considering.
The Pens, on the other hand, faced a tired and overrated Hurricanes team with incredibly shoddy defense and suspect goaltending. The 'Canes forwards couldn't buy a competent power play, the Charmin-soft defenders let Crosby, Malkin and Talbot (!) skate unmolested to, around and within the net with regularity, and the Hurricanes determinedly laid out the welcome mat in the crease in the first and second periods of all four games.
Ultimately, which team will fall victim to its weaknesses? Can a Pittsburgh team without a true physical presence (other than Kunitz... if you think for even a second that Bill Guerin is "Ford Tough" enough to mimic the Ducks, you've been watching far too much Eastern Conference hockey) bloody Detroit's nose enough to get them off their game? Can the Penguins' forwards skill their way through the Wings' superior positioning enough to launch quality scoring chances at Osgood? Is the Pittsburgh defense deep enough to withstand wave after wave of the Red Tide?
The Answers: No, no and no. With the injuries to Lidstrom and Datysuk, it's unlikely the Wings will sweep the Pens, but I'd be shocked if the Pens were able to stretch this series past five games. This isn't the Cakewalk to the Cup anymore, Pens fans: as a lifelong Wings-hater, I hate to say it but Detroit is going to cruise their way to this one last Cup, before Lidstrom retires and they fall back into the middle of the Western Conference. Just not this year.
That's it for this week's Cupcheck: tune in next week when I scramble to explain the Penguins' 3-0 series lead on the Wings, and blame it on a Perfect Storm of Lidstrom's groin injuries, Malkin's mom and sunspots.
