Potent Penguins Make Game 7 a Dud

WASHINGTON -- Just a couple of minutes into the second period of Wednesday night's big hockey game at the raucous arena here nicknamed The Phone Booth, let's just say the line went dead. All of a sudden, you could barely hear a thing, except for that scraping sound that metal blades make sliding across the ice.

At this particular point, they were the skates laced to the feet -- the clay feet, as it turns out -- of Simeon Varlamov, the young goalie for the hometown Capitals. He was skating to the swinging door of his team's bench, head down, and would not come back. A fourth puck had just screamed past him and into the back of the net

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The outcome of Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals was all but etched in the record books. The visitors from Pittsburgh were leading 4-0. For the Capitals to come back in the remaining 37 minutes would take a monumental reversal of fortune -- not unlike, come to think of it, that which the advancing Penguins put together the last third of the regular season.

For what the Capitals failed to do on their home ice Wednesday night -- eventually losing in embarrassing fashion, 6-2 -- was extinguish as hot a team as there has been in the East post-All-Star Game weekend. With all the outrageous excitement that was going on in this half of the East semifinals, which pitted the last two Hart Trophy winners -- Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby and Washington's Alex Ovechkin -- that became an easily forgotten fact.

But the Penguins won 18 of their last 25 regular season contests dating to Valentine's Day.

If the Penguins continue playing like they did against the Capitals, however, they will represent the East for the Stanley Cup, whether the Hurricanes or the top-seeded Bruins emerge victorious from their Game 7 Thursday in Boston.

"We like to think that we can play any way," Penguins wing Bill Guerin, who scored the third goal of the game 28 seconds into the second period, told me afterward.



Against the Capitals, who were the fourth highest scoring team during the regular season, that meant being offensive enough to keep up and defensive enough to not to fall far behind. The Penguins excelled at both.

"That's the style we try to play," said Penguins defenseman Mark Eaton. "We wear teams down and we've done a great job of playing smart hockey, getting pucks behind their line [defense]."

Indeed, the Penguins came into the decisive Game 7 with 67 more shots on goal than the Capitals managed against them. That's roughly two extra games' worth of shots. After the first two games, that the Capitals won, the Capitals basically were dodging bullets for the rest of the series. Wednesday they got a whole fusillade.

The Penguins jumped to a 2-0 lead Wednesday in the first period with 16 shots to the Capitals' five. The Penguins never let the Capitals come up for air and their goalie, Marc-Andre Fleury, only had to sweat once. Ovechkin got a breakaway early in the game and Fleury slammed the door on him. It was the only drama of the entire game.

It was a shame these Eastern Conference semifinals ended as they did. This was the one time it was good that this series was being broadcast on the hardly universal network called Versus. This wasn't the game with which to sell your sport.

The Penguins' blowout was hardly emblematic of what took place in the previous six games. Five games were decided by one goal, three of them required overtime and each winner had to come from behind at some point until Wednesday night.

It wasn't just the height of competitiveness that made this series so compelling, it was its star power, of course. But Wednesday night, only Pittsburgh's young superstar Crosby, one season removed from winning the league's MVP Hart Trophy, shone through. He tallied two goals and an assist. Last season's Hart winner, the Capitals' young superstar Ovechkin, registered a point with just less than two minutes left in the second period. The game was well out of hand then, however. The Penguins had a five spot on the scoreboard at that point.

"It was definitely anticlimactic," a dejected Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau summed up for everyone in the end. "It certainly wasn't the way I would have envisioned it, scripted it, whether we won or loss. I never would have thought that we would have ended up in a game like it was tonight [Wednesday]."

For much of this season, the Penguins hadn't played anywhere near as well as they played Wednesday. Before the All-Star break, they'd played so poorly they implemented a coaching change. But they really didn't start playing so stout until after Sergei Gonchar, once a stalwart with the Capitals, returned from injury on Valentine's Day and Guerin was had on the trade deadline and coach Dan Bylsma was handed the clipboard. Since all that, the Penguins have been a totally different team.

"We really changed our style from a trapping system to an aggressive system," said Kris Letang, who chipped in goal No. 4 that chased Varlamov. "Guys adapted pretty quickly."

They won nine of 10 between middle February and early March and never looked back at a first half that had them looking like anything but a playoff team. Now the Penguins look like Cup engravers.