Heroes of Hockeytown

Quoth the article: "Here are the lines they practiced with, though Babcock said not to read anything into them, that he split up Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg just to get them skating through the middle of the ice."

Way I see it games that go to a shootout are a tie anyways. You've played 65 minutes of hockey and there's no winner, you each get a point. Only difference now is they do some other silly thing afterwards and someone does get an extra point.

Willy is a bit of a shootout specialist, it was the right choice. The shot attempt didn't seem very good but they aren't all winners; you look great when it goes in and like an idiot when it doesn't.

Jimmy did a great job but I think the shot totals were a bit misleading. No doubt the Pens carried the play and had the better of the scoring chances (partly as a function of the Wings being unable to do f***all on offense), but it never struck me as anything particularly out of the ordinary. The shots against were similar to the Preds game, but is there any doubt the Wings had a much better game defensively than they did Friday? If they had been able to do anything besides pass pucks into each others' skates or dump it in and lose it immediately there wouldn't have seemed to be such a disparity.

Hockey's a dumb sport, I think I'll start following lacrosse instead.

That's 100% a penalty shot.

Okay. That could have been considerably worse.

Haha, nice play Rafalski. Malkin was never expecting the headbutt.

I'm sensing a theme here...

If Brad Stuart played against the Pens for 82 games every year he'd win the Art Ross.

The Wings are 2:1 connecting to Penguins sticks over Wings.

None of these guys have their scopes calibrated today. Everything's off.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joyce, look right the f*** out. This, this is what literary genius looks like.

They've only been given 7 blocked shots, but it definitely feels like more than that.

I don't know how Crosby ends up being completely ignored there.

Wings have been one and done on all these PPs, not good.

The Wings have had like three scoring chances in this game. They should score on the next 15 consecutive shots or I'll be grumpy.

Pierre accuses everyone for too many men constantly.

Yeah, but they traded away Hagman, Stajan, and Blake. Do they expect Phaneuf to make up that offense?

The Pens had a couple good chances, but it was a far cry from the first period against Nashville. Most of their shots were harmless, but the Wings didn't do much of anything on the other side of the ice either.

They have a bunch a shots but most of them weren't any good. This has been a pretty uneventful period, really.

At ease, killer, the game's only 10 minutes old.

The Draper slapshot special.

Did anyone get hit with that stick?

From Darren Dreger's Twitter: when asked if Stajan and Hagman are main pieces in Phaneuf trade, source says "its bigger than that." THE PLOT THICKENS