DETROIT — The Pittsburgh Penguins might have shocked the Detroit Red Wings, but they didn’t shock themselves.
Last Friday night at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena, the Penguins got a pair of goals from Maxime Talbot and a great goaltending performance from Marc-Andre Fleury en route to a 2-1 victory over the Red Wings in Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup final.
With the win, Sidney Crosby got his first Stanley Cup and the Penguins avenged last year’s six-game loss to the Wings in the final. It’s unlikely anyone in hockey — except for the true Penguins believers and all those folks who hate the Red Wings for being winners — expected Pittsburgh to win four of the last five games of the series to claim the Cup.
“Dream come true. It’s everything you work for,” said Crosby, the youngest captain ever to win a Cup and a young man who was also criticized by the Red Wings for not shaking hands with Wings captain Nick Lidstrom after the game. “It just feels so good. This is exactly how you picture it, what you play for.”
It was only the 14th Game 7 in Stanley Cup finals history, although it was the fifth Game 7 of this decade. It was also the first time a road team had won a Game 7 since the Montreal Canadiens beat the Chicago Blackhawks in 1971.
This year’s final was sensational, perhaps one of the best Cup finals in more than two decades. It was an amazing comeback by the Penguins, who trailed 2-0 in the series and came back to win four of the last five games.
Evgeni Malkin, who was the NHL’s leading scorer in the regular season and in the playoffs was named playoff MVP, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy.
“For us, it was a different guy every night,” Crosby said. “That save that Marc (-Andre Fleury) made with one second left, he’s done that a number of times in the series.”
Crosby was referring to Fleury’s desperation save on Lidstrom in the dying seconds that preserved the Penguins victory.
Meanwhile, for winning coach Dan Bylsma, a former draft pick of the Winnipeg Jets, the victorty was almost hard to believe.
“Life’s a bugger,” Bylsma said during his post-game press conference. “I had dreams about this day. I hoped this would happen someday, but good coaches have coached a long time and never gotten an opportunity like this. A lot of times, your first opportunity doesn’t come with a team that’s this talented or this group of players. I’m very fortunate in that regard.”
While most hockey fans were pleased with the outcome of the Stanley Cup final, not many were happy with Judge Redfield T. Baum’s decision to block Jim Balsillie’s attempt to buy the Phoenix Coyotes and move them to Hamilton.
In a 21-page document Baum wrote that the court didn’t feel there was enough time to resolve all the issues before the offer for purchase of the insolvent team to Balsillie (for a hefty $212.5 million) closed on June 29.
The question now is: Who IS going to pay for the disaster that is the Phoenix Coyotes. The league says it will find an owner. It also claims the reason for the financial demise of the Coyotes was rotten ownership and bad management, meaning NHL commissioner Gary Bettman believes owner Jerry Moyes is nothing more than a bank, Wayne Gretzky is a buffoon and Doug Moss is an idiot.
I wonder if Bettman has the stones to say that to their faces?
Regardless, Bettman loves to say he saved the Pittsburgh Penguins and can do the same with the Coyotes. Great! So is he going to demand that the Penguins give Sidney Crosby, Jordan Staal, Evgeni Malkin and Marc-Andre Fleury to the Coyotes? Because if you understand anything about hockey — or North American sport, for that matter — the only way you can turn shit into Shinola is if you give a city a winner.
Pittsburgh, when it was in trouble, was able to draft some of the best players ever to play the game. Unless Phoenix can use that sixth pick this year to come up with the next Gretzky (player Gretzky, not coach Gretkzy), Bettman won’t be able to save anything. After all, the Coyotes already have a new arena.
Hockey is dead in Phoenix and Gary Bettman along with his hand-picked new owner won’t bring it back to life.