-How did we win this game? Well, in the past, (rightly or wrongly) fans would kind of sigh at our depth at center and maybe even laugh because we have such a big surplus of them. Tonight, that surplus more than paid off.
-Flower was much better than the score said. Our defense in front of the net was not good and, frankly, Flower had no chance on any of the goals against him. Looking at his shootout stats (7 shots, 7 saves) tells you all about what the score should’ve been, in my opinion.
-Let’s get to the elephant in the room: the Staal-Prust incident. Staal wasn’t having a good game before the incident, so the check on TK by Prust must’ve set him off in terms of frustration. I get that Jordan was trying to stick up for a teammate and I love him for that, but a sucker punch is not needed . Did Prust go down easily? Certainly, but why would Staal try to punch him in the first place? Of all the games to go ape s***, Staal chooses the game where Sid, Geno, and Letestu are out. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I expect a fine and maybe a suspension to come out of this. To say the least, I thought Jordan would have used better judgment in a situation like that.
-Now that that’s out of the way, on to other matters:
-Kunitz continues to quietly have an awesome season. I don’t know if it’s quiet in that he’s just an underrated player or quiet because he’s shut up all the people who said he was way over paid.
-Jeffrey was very impressive after a slow start to the game. In the absence of just about every other forward on the team, he really stepped it up.
-I thought Martin had a fantastic game. He was joining rushes,making plays in the offensive zone, and boxing out forwards in his own zone. In the past three weeks or so, he’s really played his best hockey and I hope it continues to be that way.
-Marian Gaborik was invisible.
-Letang had a pretty good game, but he only attempted one shot (a missed shot). In a game missing so much offense, that’s unacceptable.
-Poor Talbot has been playing great hockey for a few weeks now with nothing to show for it. Hopefully a primary assist means that he’s getting out of his snake bitten funk. If he doesn’t, he may not be wearing a Penguin uniform much longer.
-With all these injuries, I really hope Malkin isn’t rushed back tomorrow. We all know he wants to play really badly and with the shortage of offense, you never know…
-I’ll be straight up here and say, honest to God, I don’t think we deserved to win this game. We didn’t play well enough to win, in my mind. The Pens have the performances of select players to thank for the two points tonight.
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