(I would've posted this earlier, but I had work. Sorry to steal Bryan's spotlight.)
Pittsburgh is a tough team to beat. It's harder to beat the refs though. Today's game was atrocious. I was fine with Atlanta's disaster in refereeing, in which the first 7 minutes of the game took 30 to play, because the officiating was bad on both sides. But today's game reminded me of Game 5 of last year's 2nd round series between these two teams.
You remember.
Don't you?
Ryan Malone high-sticks Chris Drury. Drury has a blade-shaped slice on his cheek. The game pauses for 5 minutes so they can clean the blood up. No penalty. Later, Drury nicks Malone. 4-minute penalty.
I'm not saying there is an anti-Ranger bias, no way. I am saying there is a pro-Penguin bias in the league, and it's been there for quite some time now.
But boy, the Rangers made them look silly with all of those flawless penalty kills.
If only they could've scored on their own power plays, but that would involve Wade Redden being off the ice, but he was out there, comically, for every single man-"advantage". (For all of John Tortorella's benching of Mike Sauer, who played 1:59 in the first and nothing else, he let Redden play a lot. Redden was directly responsible for 2 Penguin goals, Paul Mara the other two.)
A bad ending to a good back-and-forth game (once the Rangers realized, about 14 minutes into the 1st, that it was late-March and not early-November). A 5-minute interference call? I've never seen that before.
But hey. It was an important game for the Penguins. Time to bring out the obscure penalties.
That was pretty ridiculous. I guess they considered it to be an elbow, but it wouldn't have been an issue if both Crosby and Redden weren't caught sleeping at the blue line. I actually felt bad for them watching them desperately trying to flail away at Crosby with weak stick checks.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, when Orr and Godard fought, the Mellon Arena game ops staff - the best in the East, by far - played the sound of a bell ringing, then went into Danzig's "Mother" during the fight. How cool is that?