Heroes of Hockeytown

Time to put these guys down. Take us back to the Finals, Wings!

Sure there is, and he's been golfing since April. After seemingly scoring on the Wings every time they met the Yotes solely because he bears a similar name to one Nick Lidstrom...

Hopefully the Wings can dispense with the formalities tomorrow and we can begin this discussion in earnest. In the meantime, good job Pens, you handled the Canes pretty easily.

Even though Flames-Bolts was all clutch grab, it had some good drama. And from a totalyl neutral, non-Wings fan standpoint, Oil-Canes was easily the best, most competitive Final of the last few years.

This guy rejoined the Wings after getting bailed on (admittedly, for the best goalie of our generation) and accepted a back up role behind Manny friggin' Legace. That's all kinds of dedication. The dude is maybe the truest Red Wing left in the league. His salary is certainly a reflection of that.

He has not been as good since he's been separated from Lidstrom, big surprise, and he's still a rookie and it's been a long season and he's still not Lidstrom caliber or anything close, so he makes mistakes. For his age and his role I don't see how anyone can complain.

Reggie Leach of the 1976 Flyers is the only skater from a losing team to win it, when he scored an NHL record 19 playoff goals in 16 games (since matched by Jari Kurri). The Canadiens defeated the Flyers in a sweep in the Finals.

Predictably, the hit was penalized specifically because Havlat was hurt. I guess Stuart should have gone to the box when he hit Umberger and Havlat too.

The money's better and competition level is lower, so, makes sense. Good luck, Sergei.

Seriously? Hudler is a great passer. He's small and only a so-so skater, but he can dish like nobody's business.

Just a shout out to Brian Campbell for the tremendous series he's having. Right up there with Ozzie, Sammy, and Cleary as Wings' series MVP.

He and Kronwall were suitably brutal during the regular season, which doesn't set them apart from most of the team, although that pairing was especially bad. But they weren't an elite pairing in the '08 playoffs for nothing, so there was plenty of reason for optimism for them again this postseason (as if we had any other choice). Obviously Stuart has pulled through and to this point had a tremendous playoffs.

Babcock went back to ZDH and FFH for Games 5 and 6 against the Ducks and they didn't score, so he split them back up again. It's worth another go, the Hawks are not the Ducks after all, but Babcock didn't go away from those lines for no reason.

Mike really, truly does not like Hudler at center. Seeing as the center is the defensive anchor in the Wings' system, Mike presumably doesn't trust Jiri's defensive awareness (and probably skating, although he's not so bad at it now as he once was), so Helm would probably center a line like that.

Awesome.

^^^ Very cool. They show Nick three or four times there and he could just kill a man with that glare. The "showdown" part at the end was great.

Ok, I have misunderstood how deeply your hatred runs.

It's bad, and the NHL should feel bad. Between having nine days off between the Conference Finals and Cup Finals and then having it start with a back to back, they really must have an excuse with scheduling conflicts at the JLA (or potentially the United Center ).

The OP was regarding Game 4 specifically.

Providing they meet, which seems likely: Crosby and Malkin are better this year for sure, but to me it's still basically just those two guys with Guerin and Fedotenko riding shotgun. I'm sure it'll be no small feat to contain them but there's no team better equipped for it than the Wings, so it should be a good battle; after the way Getzlaf ran roughshod over this defense I'm ready to see anything. The Wings, on the other hand, are just getting goals from everywhere. On any given night anyone can score. Other than maybe Franzen they don't seem to have any one guy that steps up and dominates night-in and night-out, which is good to have for reliability and consistency on that front, but they have it on another front with the depth of scoring in the top nine.

Land on a triple word score for massive damage.

Obviously a coach's job is to ***** and try and steer the officiating his way if he can, but spare us the hyperbole, Q. Hitchcock complained about face offs but he was at least very gracious in defeat and gave the Wings tons of credit for winning as thoroughly as they did... Carlyle was a bitter old curmudgeon.

1. Flip 2. Hoss 3. Cam Barker (lame ass charity star for losing team)

Havlat was gone with an injury, Eager had gotten booted for a game misconduct, and Versteeg got a 10 minute misconduct with 5 minutes left in the game to eject him. By my count there were 12 roughing calls in total.

He was talking about the penalty to Walker after the first had ended, that he served at the start of the second and Flip scored on. To be honest I didn't see what happened either. There were so many scrums I can't remember if a Hawks player instigated that scrum or what.