detroit hits the old igloo tonight for the third game of the stanley cup final, and i'll tell you what: i don't have a lot of hope for the pens. the wings have pretty much dismantled their offense, and thoroughly shaken their confidence & composure... this team looks its age. they are boys playing the men...
heading back to pittsburgh, my initial reaction was that the pens would get a significant boost from regaining the last change. here's what NHL.com has to say on this subject :
The Wings will not have the last change in Pittsburgh, but Babcock said that won't impact his plans in the least.
"No, we're going to play the way we play, regardless," Babcock said. "And so there's two trends of thought. I can get our guys on and off the ice all night long, if we want to do that. That's normally not what we do. What we'll do is we have, in our opinion, in the Draper line and Filppula line and Zetterberg line, lines that can play against anybody. We have two (defense) pairs that we're real comfortable with against anybody. If you look at the nine and the four guys, we'll just let them go.
what an absolute luxury of riches, babcock has to work with. what a complete and total glut. it's beyond enviable, truly, for him to be able to, essentially, say, "our fourth line might not play much, and our third defensive pairing might get most of the night off, but otherwise we're totally confident that we can continue to embarass the competition..."
if only calgary could be so lucky....
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There was a quote from Sutter in the paper recently that the only real difference between the Wings and the rest of the play-off teams in the WC was...Nik Lidstrom. No mention of Datsyuk, Zetterberg, Franzen, Rafalski, Filpula. He implied, sans Lidstrom, the Wings would be in the thick of the battle with the rest of us.
Sigh.
my dad was telling me something about having read a sutter quote outlining that he didn't believe in the redwings system... uh, HUNH ??? there is a reason this team has been at/near the top of the standings every season, and has a legitimate shot at the cup every year.... and if you remove liddy from the equation, i still say they're contending, albeit probably not as utterly dominant.
if the red machine wins the cup this year, i think there's a serious possibility of a lidstrom retirement.... so i guess we'll see.
No doubt Lidstrom is a key member of the team. He's one of the best defensemen ever. But no single player can account for the Red Wings record and dominance over their rivals. Lidstrom alone doesn't explain the Wings +70 GD during the regular season. If Sutter actually thinks the Wings success is predicated on Lidstrom's excellence alone, he's delusional.
obviously lidstrom is a future hall-of-famer and a massive contributor to the success of this team.
the LA kings with gretzky were good, but they were no 80s oilers. a single player does not a cup-winner make....
sutter is starting to scare me a little... i figure he has one more year to prove that 03/04 wasn't a total anomaly....
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