DK: And just like that, it's a lot less impossible, huh?
Momentum shift?
Eh. The only 'Mo' that finally moved around here was Anthony Mantha, who followed a wholly invisible showing in these Stanley Cup playoffs with a powerful overall performance as part of the Penguins again fending off elimination and the Flyers, 3-2, in Game 5 Monday night here at PPG Paints Arena.
Meaning beyond this sharp setup of Elmer Soderblom's icebreaker ...
ELMER SODERBLOM SCORES ON THE FIRST SHOT OF THE GAME!!! #StanleyCup
... one begun by banging big Rasmus Ristolainen off the puck behind the Philadelphia net.
"Awesome play by Mo," Soderblom would tell me. "He had an awesome game all-around."
Yep. The whole third line did, including Ben Kindel. A welcome upgrade unto itself.
But some broader momentum to the series, with the Penguins having now survived twice?
Don't even think about it, as Bryan Rust would make clear upon my asking:
"Things can change on a dime," he'd reply with a slight shake of the head. "We're just trying to take things one shift, one period at a time."
But are the Penguins themselves, I'd follow up, starting to find their own peak form?
"I think we're continuing to build. We're finding some things that are working for us, and we're gonna continue to try to build on those, and find new things that can help us win games."
I asked the same momentum question of Connor Dewar:
"I don't really think about that," he'd reply. "I'm trying to approach it ... you know, we're just fighting to stay together. Every win is a few more days together, so that's the way I'm approaching it."
My friends, the only longer odds in this series than the Penguins overcoming a 3-0 deficit just might've been the soft-spoken Dewar providing its most compelling quote. But I'll be damned if that wasn't it.
Keeping this real, please allow me to remind, as I did a couple nights ago from Philadelphia: This remains next to impossible, and I offer the qualifier only because it's occurred all of four times in the NHL's century-plus history out of 203 such scenarios. And there are countless reasons for that, any of which could still enter this scenario, no matter how real or imagined any momentum might actually be.
In the same breath, though, I'm comfortable putting forth the following: The odds of coming back from a 3-2 deficit aren't dramatic at all. And that's kinda the only outlook that matters now.
Back a few decades, when the Penguins would regularly make sport of doing this sort of thing to the Capitals, Tom Barrasso once remarked after a Game 5 victory at the Civic Arena, this after Washington had taken a 3-1 series lead, that the other guys were now headed back to D.C. "to play a game they never wanted to play."
See, Game 6 Wednesday night in Philadelphia will be set on a stage before sports' most rabid fans -- and I don't mean that in the passionate sense but, rather, the sort that involves foam dripping from the fangs of diseased dogs -- who'll turn on the Flyers as soon as they once did on Santa. I've seen it innumerable times over there, and I'll see it again if it all goes south.
Those fans didn't want this game, either. Or, as one especially charming orange-clad patron screamed to no one in particular before Game 4 out there, "FINISH THIS F-ING THING TONIGHT!"
They didn't. The Penguins still might. And there has to be something to that. Just has to.
But it'll also have to be accompanied by more of this brand of hockey, won't it?
They'll have to keep getting the best out of Sidney Crosby, whose two primary assists on this night rose above taking a slap shot to the knee -- scarcely missed a shift after hobbling off -- and then being leveled from behind a few seconds after the final horn by this trashy Travis Konecny cross-check:
Looks like there was a cross check well after the final buzzer from Travis Konecny on Sidney Crosby👎
If this were a real league, a suspension for Konecny would be a real worry for Philadelphia. But since it's still run out of Gary Bettman's garage ... yeah.
They'll have to keep getting the best out of a stirringly revitalized Kris Letang, the evening's deserving No. 1 star, and no, I'm not at all referring to his bizarre game-winning goal:
He was smart, skillful, swift and ... snarly. Which has always been peak Letang.
They'll have to keep getting the best out of their bottom-six, a season-long trait that seemed to disappear through the first three games of this series. Soderblom's goal was only a slice of by far his most effective game of these playoffs, and Dewar's in-and-out rocket off the rush ...
... continued a legit-looking resurgence for the fourth line in general.
They'll have to keep getting plenty-good-enough goaltending from Arturs Silovs, who's now 2-0 after stopping 18 of 20 shots and has taken command of the crease.
They'll have to keep getting pucks to Dan Vladar, if only for the not-zero-percent chance that he'll just score the thing on his own.
They'll have to keep getting through the neutral zone by any means necessary, most recently by racing breakouts ahead before the Flyers can adopt their passive posture.
They'll have to keep getting the team-wide commitment to defending in all three zones that was seen for the most part here. Could've been more diligent.
They'll have to keep getting the opponent to do the goading while avoiding retaliation, no matter how glorious the latter must feel in some situations.
They'll have to get more, too: Evgeni Malkin was as off in this game as he was on for the previous game. Same for Ryan Shea, charged with four giveaways here. Erik Karlsson's been OK overall, but we're still waiting on the superhuman version from March. Egor Chinakhov's never gonna get a goal if he doesn't register a shot, which he didn't here. Ilya Solovyov has to keep his feet moving, or he'll log even less ice time than his 6:09.
Let me make this plain: The Penguins have yet to bring their A-plus. And I mean that independent of how their opponent fares. They've yet to get it going on all gears.
"Yeah," Soderblom would say to that when I brought it up, "but we're getting there."
Sid worded that wonderfully, just after picking himself up from the cheap shot, into Silovs' ear:
"Throughout the season, we've been in different situations, and I think we've done a great job at handling adversity," Sid would say later at the media podium. "Again, here, we're faced with more. It doesn't get any easier, so we know it's a big challenge. I think we have a lot of belief in our group, and we've done it time and time again, so we've got to do it again."
THE ASYLUM
DK: And just like that, it's a lot less impossible, huh?
Momentum shift?
Eh. The only 'Mo' that finally moved around here was Anthony Mantha, who followed a wholly invisible showing in these Stanley Cup playoffs with a powerful overall performance as part of the Penguins again fending off elimination and the Flyers, 3-2, in Game 5 Monday night here at PPG Paints Arena.
Meaning beyond this sharp setup of Elmer Soderblom's icebreaker ...
... one begun by banging big Rasmus Ristolainen off the puck behind the Philadelphia net.
"Awesome play by Mo," Soderblom would tell me. "He had an awesome game all-around."
Yep. The whole third line did, including Ben Kindel. A welcome upgrade unto itself.
But some broader momentum to the series, with the Penguins having now survived twice?
Don't even think about it, as Bryan Rust would make clear upon my asking:
"Things can change on a dime," he'd reply with a slight shake of the head. "We're just trying to take things one shift, one period at a time."
But are the Penguins themselves, I'd follow up, starting to find their own peak form?
"I think we're continuing to build. We're finding some things that are working for us, and we're gonna continue to try to build on those, and find new things that can help us win games."
I asked the same momentum question of Connor Dewar:
"I don't really think about that," he'd reply. "I'm trying to approach it ... you know, we're just fighting to stay together. Every win is a few more days together, so that's the way I'm approaching it."
Oh.
Pretty telling stuff about the tightness of this room.
My friends, the only longer odds in this series than the Penguins overcoming a 3-0 deficit just might've been the soft-spoken Dewar providing its most compelling quote. But I'll be damned if that wasn't it.
Keeping this real, please allow me to remind, as I did a couple nights ago from Philadelphia: This remains next to impossible, and I offer the qualifier only because it's occurred all of four times in the NHL's century-plus history out of 203 such scenarios. And there are countless reasons for that, any of which could still enter this scenario, no matter how real or imagined any momentum might actually be.
In the same breath, though, I'm comfortable putting forth the following: The odds of coming back from a 3-2 deficit aren't dramatic at all. And that's kinda the only outlook that matters now.
Back a few decades, when the Penguins would regularly make sport of doing this sort of thing to the Capitals, Tom Barrasso once remarked after a Game 5 victory at the Civic Arena, this after Washington had taken a 3-1 series lead, that the other guys were now headed back to D.C. "to play a game they never wanted to play."
That's this. That's exactly this.
See, Game 6 Wednesday night in Philadelphia will be set on a stage before sports' most rabid fans -- and I don't mean that in the passionate sense but, rather, the sort that involves foam dripping from the fangs of diseased dogs -- who'll turn on the Flyers as soon as they once did on Santa. I've seen it innumerable times over there, and I'll see it again if it all goes south.
Those fans didn't want this game, either. Or, as one especially charming orange-clad patron screamed to no one in particular before Game 4 out there, "FINISH THIS F-ING THING TONIGHT!"
They didn't. The Penguins still might. And there has to be something to that. Just has to.
But it'll also have to be accompanied by more of this brand of hockey, won't it?
They'll have to keep getting the best out of Sidney Crosby, whose two primary assists on this night rose above taking a slap shot to the knee -- scarcely missed a shift after hobbling off -- and then being leveled from behind a few seconds after the final horn by this trashy Travis Konecny cross-check:
If this were a real league, a suspension for Konecny would be a real worry for Philadelphia. But since it's still run out of Gary Bettman's garage ... yeah.
They'll have to keep getting the best out of a stirringly revitalized Kris Letang, the evening's deserving No. 1 star, and no, I'm not at all referring to his bizarre game-winning goal:
He was smart, skillful, swift and ... snarly. Which has always been peak Letang.
They'll have to keep getting the best out of their bottom-six, a season-long trait that seemed to disappear through the first three games of this series. Soderblom's goal was only a slice of by far his most effective game of these playoffs, and Dewar's in-and-out rocket off the rush ...
... continued a legit-looking resurgence for the fourth line in general.
They'll have to keep getting plenty-good-enough goaltending from Arturs Silovs, who's now 2-0 after stopping 18 of 20 shots and has taken command of the crease.
They'll have to keep getting pucks to Dan Vladar, if only for the not-zero-percent chance that he'll just score the thing on his own.
They'll have to keep getting through the neutral zone by any means necessary, most recently by racing breakouts ahead before the Flyers can adopt their passive posture.
They'll have to keep getting the team-wide commitment to defending in all three zones that was seen for the most part here. Could've been more diligent.
They'll have to keep getting the opponent to do the goading while avoiding retaliation, no matter how glorious the latter must feel in some situations.
They'll have to get more, too: Evgeni Malkin was as off in this game as he was on for the previous game. Same for Ryan Shea, charged with four giveaways here. Erik Karlsson's been OK overall, but we're still waiting on the superhuman version from March. Egor Chinakhov's never gonna get a goal if he doesn't register a shot, which he didn't here. Ilya Solovyov has to keep his feet moving, or he'll log even less ice time than his 6:09.
Let me make this plain: The Penguins have yet to bring their A-plus. And I mean that independent of how their opponent fares. They've yet to get it going on all gears.
"Yeah," Soderblom would say to that when I brought it up, "but we're getting there."
Sid worded that wonderfully, just after picking himself up from the cheap shot, into Silovs' ear:
"Throughout the season, we've been in different situations, and I think we've done a great job at handling adversity," Sid would say later at the media podium. "Again, here, we're faced with more. It doesn't get any easier, so we know it's a big challenge. I think we have a lot of belief in our group, and we've done it time and time again, so we've got to do it again."
Back to the Turnpike.
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