Surprising Sens force Game 7
Hoffman breaks tie, winner takes all Thursday in Pitt
The Penguins were rolling. The Penguins were too good. It was the second period of an elimination game and the Pittsburgh Penguins were rolling over the Ottawa Senators, and then Evgeni Malkin shrugged off Zack Smith and scored a goal that the CBC’s Jim Hughson described as “Malkin, from Malkin and Malkin.”
Sometimes, the other guys just have better players. For Ottawa, you could feel the series slipping away.
And then it didn’t. The Penguins took a couple penalties. The Senators, who worked on their five-on-three power play on Monday as part of a practice that was designed to make them feel good about themselves, scored on the twoman advantage, Bobby Ryan, great passing play, perfect shot. It was tied after two periods, and the crowd was loud. It was a game, boy.
Mike Hoffman broke the tie 94 seconds into the third with a rocket from the wing; Craig Anderson, in the Senators goal, held the line, and held it, and held it.
In a game where Malkin was a beast and Sidney Crosby was dangerous, Ottawa managed to pull the series back to where it began: Pittsburgh scoring one goal per game, and this thing up in the air. Ottawa won Game 6 by a score of 2-1, and Game 7 is Thursday night in Pittsburgh.
This Penguins team has been absolutely carried by its stars. Coming into the game Malkin had a league-leading 23 points, Sidney Crosby had 19, Phil Kessel had 18 and Jake Guentzel, Crosby’s linemate, had 16. All four were in the top five in the league in playoff scoring. The next-highest Penguins scorer was the injured Justin Schultz, with eight. And as their team coalesced around them the Penguins pushed the Senators to the edge of elimination with a 7-0 win in Game 5.
You want to beat the Penguins, you have to outpace their stars. In Game 6, the Senators did.
“I think we’re through with the runand-gun thing,” said Ottawa coach Guy Boucher before the game. “We know that. We tried that last game, and we got killed. Like we expected — I mean, we talked about that before the series. If we want to play head-to-head against them with their strengths, there is no game. We’ve just got to be ourselves.”
“We need to make sure we stay with what made us successful, and the minute we get away from that, there’s no game. So there’s a game when we’re at our best doing what we do with our identity, and that’s making sure we’re not giving their players the space they need to do what they do best.”
The place wasn’t sold out — maybe it was because a town with little built-in corporate base was tapped out after eight expensive playoff home games, and maybe it was because the Senators lost Game 5 by a score of 7-0 and this see-saw series suddenly felt hopeless.
And maybe it was because there was a soccer game across town, and maybe it was because the rink’s 45 minutes from downtown in a city where it feels like every single person works nine to five.
On NBC, Doc Emrick said it was the first conference final game in a decade that didn’t sell out; CBC said the last one not to sell out in Canada happened in Montreal in 1993. Either way, this was the biggest game since the franchise lost the Stanley Cup final in 2007, and the Senators had won one playoff series in nine years since then, until this year. And now they were in a Game 6 against the Stanley Cup champs with a chance to force a Game 7, and there were whole rows of seats vacant in the upper deck, and spotted around the lower bowl. Some of the seats filled up, but not all of them.
But the crowd sounded great, and greater as the game went on, and the team had a lot to do with that. Pittsburgh had a goal waved off when it was ruled that Trevor Daley’s stick pushed Anderson into the net be- fore Daley scored. A few minutes later Malkin got to a puck in the corner, as part of an unfolding wave of pressure. Malkin rolled off Zack Smith’s check, spun out of the corner, rolled off Smith’s attempts to chase him as if Smith was a bothersome kid, shot the puck, collected the rebound and tucked it around Anderson’s pad: 1-0. Sometimes, you just have the best players.
The Penguins had taken control of the game, and they were in control of the game. The shots in the second period went 12-3 for Pittsburgh, then 13, 14, 15. Anderson was holding Ottawa in it, but just.
And then Ron Hainsey took an interference penalty and Ian Cole took a high-sticking penalty, and the Senators found belief. Boucher said at the time the practice was partly just to restore spirits; if he was playing the long game, it worked. The place was real loud, just then.
Boucher talked about being who you are, and now both teams face something stark: Be who you are in one more game and you get to play the Nashville Predators for the Stanley Cup. Or it ends with a thud. One game left, and everyone gets to see what happens next.