Stanley Cup Finals: Close Doesn’t Count

Woulda, coulda, shoulda ... for the Pittsburgh Penguins, just imagine how different their 1-2 deficit against the Red Wings would have been if Marc-Andre Fleury pulled out a clutch save or if one of those Sidney Crosby/Bill Guerin passing plays was just an inch over from the post instead of directly on it. But, as a wise man once said, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Here's the problem facing the Pittsburgh Penguins: they actually played pretty well for stretches of Game 1 and Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final. Well enough, in fact, that if the Detroit Red Wings didn't have a few bounces go their way, the results could have been different. This is different from last year, where the awe-struck Penguins were brutalized by a confident Red Wings team; one could argue that the Penguins have carried the play more than the Wings. So, if you could freeze time and shift the angle of a few bounces, the Penguins could be up 3-0. Of course, you could say that the Wings deserved to win Game 3 and should be up 3-0.

But again, close doesn't win anything. Call it flukey bounces, luck, or karma; whatever it is, the only stat that matters is the big W next to the Red Wings' name on the box score for the first two games and the Penguins win in Game 3.

Looking deeper, though, and one could (and should) subscribe to the old adage that you create your own breaks — or as philosopher Carl Jung once said, there's no such thing as luck, only what you make. In that case, while Sidney Crosby and Henrik Zetterberg have essentially canceled each other out (though both had enough chances to get their share of points in this game of inches), it's the role players that stole the first two games in the Motor City. Guys like Darren Helm, who come with literally zero goal-scoring experience, managed to turn into a hero this playoffs, and he's continued his play in the finals. On the other hand, Matt Cooke might be throwing his weight around for the Penguins, but he's not scoring any significant goals. He's the type of player that needs to surprise people with a timely goal (Maxime Talbot might fill in that role with the way things are going).

How does one create breaks like that? Simple — a combination of throwing the puck at the net and crashing the crease. When you don't shoot, you don't score, and when there's no traffic in front, there's nothing for the puck to bounce off of. And eventually, bounces wind up evening out between two teams over a long series.

It would help if Marc-Andre Fleury stepped his game up. Some of his goals-against were flukey, but you can't totally absolve Fleury of the strange bounces coming off the Joe Louis boards. By now, everyone knows the boards in Detroit have an active kick, and the Red Wings have used this as actual strategy for years. One of the critical areas of adjustment is the ability to be aware of this and react if necessary.

What did that mean going into Game 3? If anything, the teams were obviously fatigued — the long stretches of neutral zone play made it the least entertaining game of the season. Crosby's not the kind of player where one Game 3 assist will unleash a flood of scoring chances because he already generated his share. Malkin's been able to get more time away from Detroit's best checkers, but someone like Jordan Staal still wasn't there for significant shifts. The biggest difference was Marc-Andre Fleury, who made up for some of his gaffes in the first two games (though one good game doesn't absolve two bad game) and decided to make his most timely saves of the series.

So where do we go from here? The Penguins are still in a hole, and when you're behind in a playoff series, the one thing to do is to follow the notion of "One Game at a Time." Of course, the odds are still stacked against the Penguins — note that the majority of teams that come back from deficits are usually the favored seed for a reason. However, what might be a little more appropriate is to look at things in short series rather than one big series. The Red Wings won the first two-game series, the Penguins have captured the first game in the next two-game series. If they win Game 4, suddenly the past is erased and it's a best of three.

That's the thing with a series like this when both teams are essentially playing fairly competitively — the past doesn't really matter that much. In theory, the Penguins could have split in Detroit and the Wings took Game 3 to bring us to 2-1 Detroit. Or the Pens could have taken the opener while the Wings won the next two. It doesn't really matter as no team has picked up such unstoppable momentum as to make the other team fold and go home.

When the Hurricanes and Red Wings played in the Cup final in 2002, the Hurricanes took Game 1 but the domination of the Wings felt like a growing snowball. Not here; this is a fist fight between two fairly close teams that have different strengths and weaknesses.

Will we see Pavel Datsyuk in Game 4 (and how healthy will he be)? Will the younger legs of the Penguins stand up to the shortened schedule compared to the Wings? Will the Penguins get overconfident and forget to show up on Thursday night?

At this point, it's anyone's game. At least for us fans, we get a better chance of this becoming a memorable series rather than a blowout.