Who would have thought the same two teams would wind up in the Stanley Cup Final again? Not this sports writer.
Since the 1983-84 season, no duo of previous final contenders has locked horns the following year. But this year, the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins are worthy of a repeat offense.
And both are on track to become two of the greatest teams of our generation.
The defending champs are led by superstar forwards Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk, and feature a supporting cast that would make any other team a brute force. Johan Franzen and Marian Hossa are considered secondary scoring on the Red Wings, and that's a scary thought.
Then there's Chris Osgood, the ageless wonder. For a guy in his late 30s, he could probably still get a student-priced ticket at the movies. But really, he is carving a niche with the Red Wings solely because he's incapable of being a starter anywhere else.
Simply put: he doesn't have to make many big saves. And he doesn't.
Osgood's job is done if he makes 10-12 average saves per night, the complete opposite of Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury.
The Pittsburgh netminder will need to be their best player if the Penguins have any chance of leveling the series when it returns to Mellon Arena tonight.
Speaking of superstars, what about the budding donnybrook between Sidney Crosby and Zetterberg? They have gone head-to-head in the faceoff circle nearly every shift they have seen on the ice, and have delivered a handful of crushing hits to each other in the process.
Crosby's open-ice clobbering of Zetterberg in Game 1 prompted Wings coach Mike Babcock to classify it as head hunting
comments he later clarified and/or retracted. Pick your poison.
Down two games, the Penguins need all of their weaponry to show up tonight at home, and again on Thursday. The Red Wings sorely miss checking wizard Kris Draper, and with the matchup on home ice, the Penguins will look to get Evgeni Malkin some shifts against the Red Wings' bottom two lines. And they will need it.
Fleury will enjoy the comforts of home, too, without the moon-shoe springboards that encompass the outer rim of Joe Louis Arena's ice surface. Two Red Wings goals in Game 1 were misplayed by Fleury off the end boards, but it's unfair to fault the guy for bounces his defensemen should pick up.
Pittsburgh also needs more from Rob Scuderi and Hal Gill, who did a brilliant job grappling with Alex Ovechkin and Eric Staal in earlier series. If the Penguins can hold serve in their barn and return to Detroit on level terms, they're in good shape.
A split in Pittsburgh does little to help the Penguins elongate the series, and the longer this loiters, it favors their youthful exuberance.
Two games in, it's clear that this series can take one of two turns.
The Penguins can win the series in seven games, but they can also lose it in four.
- Rob Mixer is a senior studying journalism and a sports writer for The Post. If you are equally captivated
by the Stanley Cup final, send him an e-mail at rm234405@ohiou.edu. 2
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Rob Mixer
