Gee, it seems like only a month ago that the Penguins were dispatching the Ottawa Senators. I hope you all made as good use of your eight-day layoff as I did - I got engaged, so you probably didn't, but that's okay - and are well-rested headed into the Conference Finals. The only thing standing between the Pens and a shot at the Cup are the Boston Bruins, a match up that just seems right. You've got Jarome Iginla facing the team he spurned at the trade deadline, and you've got Jaromir Jagr hoping to torment his former team, but - beyond the tale of two Jaroms - you've got the cream of the Eastern Conference going head to head. There will be no Cinderella story this year (like last year's Devils), only two heavyweights sizing the other up.
After the jump, my three questions and three statements for the Pens-Bruins series, and my predictions for the series.
Question: What effect will the layoff have?
Thankfully, both teams have had an extended break, thanks to matching five-game gentleman's sweeps by the Pens and Bs in the previous round, so the tiresome "rest vs rust" debate will at least apply equally to each team. In fact, the Pens and Bruins have followed very similar paths to this point: each played a fast, young underdog in the opening round and looked shell-shocked doing it. If the Penguins could have lost to the Islanders, the Bruins should have lost to the Maple Leafs, needing a miracle comeback in Game 7 to avoid the upset. After being caught on their heels against teams with nothing to lose, both teams settled into a groove in the second round, with the Pens blazing through the paper-thin Senators and the Bruins outmatched a Rangers team that was slowly imploding.
What teams will we see after a full week without competitive hockey? Will the Penguins be able to pick up where they left off at the end of the Sens series, when they scored 13 goals in the final two games? Will the Bruins secondary scoring, which finally began to emerge against the Rangers, still be there, or will they be reliant on the Krejci-Lucic-Horton line for offense? Look for the Pens to come with the same fire that led them to dominant wins in the first game of both of their other series. Boston will be hard-pressed to keep up, but if they can withstand a few offensive flurries and grind the game down to a halt, the ice could tilt in their favor. They'll need Tukka Rask to be sharp in net and not, well...
Statement: Tuukka Rask isn't scary.
Don't get me wrong, Rask is a very good goalie who has put up elite numbers all season long. He just isn't the goalie you're terrified will steal a whole series from you, the way Tim Thomas was. His track record against the Penguins is underwhelming, to be kind, and it isn't a great sign that perhaps his most memorable moment against the Pens was this:
The Penguins just are not going to be afraid of Rask, not after what they did to Craig Anderson (who outplayed Rask all year). They'll be coming at him in waves, and he'll need to be able to shrug off the goals that will inevitably come. He'll need to soundly outplay Tomas Vokoun, who enters this series as the hottest goalie in the East. If he can't, if the Penguins can get into his head, we could see a meltdown...another meltdown, I should say. Hopefully we'll get some more fun gifs out of it.
Haha, the guy just can't stay on his feet.
Question: Which defense will step up?
The Pens and Bruins have oppositely-proportioned game-changers on the blueline in Kris Letang and Zdeno Chara, but a few questions beyond their top pairings. Throughout this series, we'll see forwards for both teams looking to punish d-men in their own zone. The Bruins, as detailed in Mike Colligan's excellent breakdown, like to put a lot of pressure on defenders handling the puck behind their own net looking for turnovers. The Penguins will have to be completely disciplined in their breakouts - if we see the wingers skating out of the zone waiting for a stretch pass that everyone knows is coming, like we did against the Islanders, the Bruins will make us pay. If, however, the Pens defenders show patience and awareness in making the right pass at the right time, there will be opportunities for odd-man rushes.
The Bruins, on the other hand, will be leaning on a handful of young defensemen, thanks to a host of injuries. Beyond their shutdown pair of Chara and Dennis Seidenberg, they employ four players who are younger than 30, including 22-year-old rookie playoff sensation Torey Krug and 24-year-old Pittsburgh native (get used to hearing about it) Matt Bartkowski. Throw in Adam McQuaid and Johnny Boychuk and you're looking at a Bruins blue line that, despite some offensive potential, looks a little thin. The Penguins will throw out four dangerous lines and try to feast on these younger players.
And we will see the Pens forecheckers attempting to climb Mount Chara game after game. Chara probably shoulders more responsibility than any other defender in the league - he's the Bruins' captain and leader, their most important player at both ends of the ice, and he paces the league with almost 30 minutes of icetime a night - and if the Penguins can break him down in this series, they'll have cut off the proverbial head of the snake. In both of these teams' regular season meetings, Matt Cooke and Pascal Dupuis targeted Chara, literally throwing their bodies into him every time he touched the puck. Chara may be huge, but he's no spring chicken and he's never been Paul Coffey on his skates, and when he starts taking a lot of hits you see more of him standing around. In this goal from the last game between the Pens and Bs, Chara gathers the puck behind his own net and, without a quick pass to make, he prepares to absorb another hit from Dupuis. The hit never comes, as Dupuis instead picks Chara's pocket and works the puck to Kunitz. Chara is slow to recover and can't reach Crosby before he rifles Kunitz's pass by Rask:
The team with the better defense will win this series, and both the Bruins and Penguins will be focused on making the opposing d-men look bad. The Penguins will need Letang to continue on his record-setting scoring pace, Martin to continue using his stick to break up plays and get them moving the other way, Orpik and Murray to clear the big Bruins bodies from the front of the net, and, more than anything, their depth to outmatch the Bruins' two horses in Chara and Seidenberg.
Statement: Match-ups will be more important in this series than any other.
We've already heard more about match-ups in the lead up to Game 1 as we've heard in either of the previous series. We know that the Bruins will try to get Patrice Bergeron on the ice against Sidney Crosby whenever possibility. Then the question becomes whether Chara will also be used against Crosby, or whether he'll be tasked with slowing Evgeni Malkin. The answer to this question, the prevailing logic goes, will determine whether Crosby or Malkin will have a big series (it's always one or the other, it seems). Less has been made about how the Penguins will match up against the Bruins, but this is the biggest, deepest, and most talented team they've played yet. Like the Penguins, they can basically run out two first lines: Lucic-Krejci-Horton and Marchand-Bergeron-Jags. It would makes sense for the Pens to match up Orpik and Martin against the Krejci line - Orpik brings size and grit, and a familiarity with leading scorer Krejci's tendencies, while Martin has been positionally sound and smart with the puck all playoffs long. Douglas Murray may also be brought in to combat the size and netfront presence of a Lucic, certainly on the penalty kill. That leaves Letang and either Eaton or Niskanen to play against the Bergeron line. Letang's speed will be essential in corralling a waterbug like Marchand, and his deftness of stick can keep Jagr from getting comfortable with the puck.
Of course, these match-ups always look cut-and-dried on paper, but once the puck drops, we'll see lines shuffled and assignments changed. If the Bruins are locked onto getting Bergeron out against Crosby, or Chara against Malkin, the Penguins can look for chances on awkward line changes, or hope for their other dangerous players - like, say, Iginla, Neal, Kunitz, Dupuis... - to fall through the cracks. Let's not sleep on the fact that the Pens will be icing a fourth line comprised of Juicy Jokes, Brenden Morrow, and Craig Adams. That kind of surplus talent is the kind of thing that pisses on the Cheerios of a team focused on shutting down a couple of key players.
Question: Are the Penguins ready to slog through a physical series?
After a wide-open series against the Islanders and the modicum of resistance put up by the Sens, the Penguins have yet to be hit in the mouth this postseason. There's a chance they will steamroll the Bruins as well with their offensive power, but there's a better chance that the Bs will find a way to turn these games into slugfests. Will the Penguins be able to adjust and win four tight-checking contests? If the past is any indication, they're ready to do just that. They've won six straight games against this Bruins team, and they are very familiar with their identity as a hard-hitting, methodical unity. This season, they've pulled out wins of 3-2, 2-1, and 3-2, finding ways of manufacturing goals when they most need them. The playoffs are, of course, a horse of a different color, and the Penguins need to be ready to throw on their hardhats and win ugly. If Crosby and Malkin are being neutralized, role players will need to step in and chip in offensively - we'll need from Morrow, Jokinen, Sutter, Cooke, Niskanen, guys like that. Team-wide discipline, starting at the top with Dan Bylsma, will need to prevail over frustration, or else the Bruins will drag them into the quicksand.
Statement: Brad Marchand will replace Claude Giroux and/or Scott Hartnell as your least favorite player in the league (at least for the next couple weeks).
Marchand has it all when it comes to being hated. He's a four-foot-tall pest who has coopted Pat Verbeek's nickname "The Little Ball of Hate" (not cool to steal another guy's nickname, guy). He's the broiest of bros (honestly, I had my choice of at least 8 drunken photos of him in various levels of shirtlessness to choose from for the above image). He's got an obnoxiously rosy-cheeked, murine (nice way of saying rat-looking) face that he's always pointing at the refs hoping for a call.
He's also, frustratingly, a pretty damn good player who is great at sneaking into scoring position and netting big goals. The Pens will be well served to try and shut him down, because when he is frustrated he can unravel (read: cry), but if he gets a couple past Vokoun, his fist-begging smile will come out and it will be very difficult to resist attacking him. He is Hartnell-level annoying, and it will fall upon the Penguins to defend him without getting caught up in the fact that he looks like Ryan Gosling's elfin little brother who was born with an allergy to physical contact, so his parents locked him in the attic and fed him only cheese and Goldschlager. At least we know that if the Pens hit him, or even if they almost hit him, he'll go down.
Prediction: Pens in 5
Pens in 6 or 7 seems to be where the smart money is going, but I think this team has the Bruins' number. The Bruins aren't a pushover like the Senators, but the Penguins should find a way to get pucks behind Rask, and I'm banking on them carrying over their quality of play from the last series. If they do, this could be a short series for Boston. Which would mean we'd have less time to hear their terrible fans talk trash, so consider this wishful thinking.
Series MVP: Tomas Vokoun
I thought long and hard about which offensive players could excel in this series - Iginla, Morrow, Dupuis, etc.etc. - but rather than picking my poison on offense, I'm going with the one player who is guaranteed to have an impact. Vokoun has been fantastic this playoffs, and I think that this is the series where we stop hearing about how he's simply making the saves he needs to, getting rebound luck, etc. etc. and admit that he is what he is: an all-star level goalie in the twilight of his career, whose tunnel vision for the elusive Cup is raising his game when it matters most. In his two starts against the Bruins in the regular season, he was dominant, and I think he continues to be. I foresee at least one shutout this series, a handful of huge, momentum-quashing saves, and more than a few shots of Fleury staring blankly from the bench.
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