Last week Seth Rorabaugh of the PG's Empty Netters wrote a blog post entitled, "What is it?". He wrote, "If someone were to ask us what the Stanley Cup playoffs mean to us, we'd have a hard time giving a simple concise answer". He then goes on to name quite a few memorable moments in playoff history like:
Last week on the Mark Madden show, he started a debate on top 10 all time NHL forwards and said that Jaromir Jagr would be on the list. I had to think about it for a minute, but I don't think Jagr would quite hit the top ten. Here's my list:
1. Mario Lemieux 2. Wayne Gretzky 3. Gordie Howe 4. Mark Messier 5. Guy Lafleur 6. Phil Esposito 7. Marcel Dionne 8. Steve Yzerman 9. Brett Hull 10. Joe Malone
I respect Jagr and his talent but I think top 10 all time, is a little much. I would rather have any of those players over Jagr. At least one caller thought so too, which then drew a challenge from Madden for the caller to name 10 forwards better than Jagr. The caller named a lot of people on this list and also named Ron Francis and Steve Yzerman. Madden scoffed at the Yzerman response and replied, "Jagr won 5 scoring titles. How many did Yzerman win? Huh? How many?". The caller correctly replied zero. Steve Yzerman was in his prime at the same time as Lemieux and Gretzky. Its next to impossible to win a scoring title when you're up against the two greatest players in the history of game. Jagr won his scoring titles matched up against Eric Lindros and Peter Forsberg. That doesn't exactly carry the same weight as Lemieux and Gretzky. Yzerman had six straight 100+ point seasons and in 5 of those seasons he scored over 50 goals. When Scotty Bowman came to Detroit he asked Yzerman, "Do you want points or Cups?" Yzerman wanted to win and dramatically changed his game to be more than just a scoring machine, but also backcheck, block shots and focus more on defense. His individual stats took a hit, but the Red Wings went on to win 4 Campbell Conference trophies, 5 Presidents trophies, the 1996 team finished with more wins than any other team in history, and won three Stanley Cups. "How many Cups did Jagr win? Huh? How many?" Saying that Jagr is better than Yzerman because he has more scoring titles is asinine. By that logic Martin St Louis is better than Yzerman, Messier, Sakic, and Hull.
Madden, unfortunately, wasn't done. The self proclaimed "Super Genius" continued, "Yzerman scored that one Game 7 goal in the playoffs, but what else has he done? Jagr was always clutch and scored a ton of big goals in the playoffs." Jagr did score a big goal in the 92 Finals against the Blackhawks, but he must not have been too clutch if all he has is two Cups and he had little to do with those championship teams. Those two Cups that he has were won by Lemieux, Stevens, Recchi, Francis, Murphy, Tocchet and Barrasso. Aside from just a couple plays, Jagr kind of just went along for the ride. Yzerman, on the other hand was very instrumental in his teams' success shutting down the opponents top line and scoring big goals at the same time. Yzerman won the Conn Smythe Trophy in '98. You can't get more clutch than being the playoff MVP of championship run. "How many Conn Smythe's did Jagr win? Huh? How many?"
Its one thing to love your team and the players that played for it, but when getting into a hockey debate, let's use a little common sense. Jagr was great for the Pens and did a lot of things for the franchise, but calling him one of the greatest of all time, that's a bit much. Steve Yzerman is widely recognized as one of the greatest leaders in all of sports. To not rank him in the top ten of forwards would be a crime. As for Jagr, I would probably rank Jagr around 15 right now and 10 years from now, he'll probably be over 20.
The other day I was fortunate enough to fall into some free hockey tickets (thank you Dave Cannone) and was going to see Crosby vs Ovechkin in what will most likely be my final game at the Mellon Arena. What a great matchup to close it out.
We got the arena at 6:50pm, but the game didn't start till 7:30pm (thank you Versus) so we had some time to kill. We walked around the arena, got a couple drinks and headed to our seats which were fantastic! Section C, to the right of the goalie, on the side that the Pens would be shooting at twice. We were right behind one of those special sections that had TV monitors. By the way, I never realized how huge the delay was between what they telecast on Versus and what was going on in the game. Its at least 20-30 seconds. Don't talk to someone at the game on a cell phone unless you like knowing well in advance what will happen.
Anyways, the Caps come out first, Alexander Ovechkin was in front... "booooo" went the Penguin fans. Ovie takes one of the Penguins practice pucks and blasts it into their net before skating over to his side of the rink... "BOOOOOOOO!!!!" It was like putting a drop of blood in a piranha tank. As Ovie headed over to his side, I began to make my way down to the glass to get some pictures. As I'm heading down, my path down the aisle gets blocked by none other than Seth Rorabaugh, the Post-Gazette's Penguins blogger. I was going to say "Hi", but we would probably start talking about hockey or the PG and take up a lot of time. So it was either talk to Seth or see two time NHL MVP Alexander Ovechkin up close during warm ups.
As I avoided eye contact with Seth, I pulled out my iPhone and made my way down to the glass. I make a point to do this before every game ever since I watched the Red Wings do their warmup back in 1996. Its always exciting to see these guys up close and it never gets old. I snapped a few of Ovie, a few of the Washington goaltenders and got a picture of some of the Caps throwing a few of the practice pucks over the glass to some kids in the front row. As I kind of expected, when all the other Caps players started making their way back their locker room, Ovie stayed out there (first one on, last one off) and took a few more blasts at the net. A few of the shots that missed the net, banged off the glass and made a sound so loud you would have thought the roof was caving in. This is why he's the greatest goal scorer of our time and scores 60 goals when everyone else is barely reaching 40.
When Ovie finally left the ice, I went back up to my seat and uploaded some of the good pictures I got onto Facebook. During the warm ups, I noticed Evgeni Malkin heading into the locker room. As it turned out, he wasn't feeling well and was a late scratch for the game. Their was a definite "GASP" amongst the crowd when that was announced. One Pens fan exclaimed, "Great! Geno's out again. Now we're going to have to beat them without one of our best players." On a side note, Caps defenseman Mike Green, who led NHL defensemen in points, was not in the lineup either.
As the game started, a "Lets Go Pens" chant started. I didn't see a lot of red Caps jerseys in the crowd, but I did hear "Lets Go Caps" pretty clearly and sometimes overtaking the Pens chants. Now the Penguins were getting to see what it was like to have the shoe on the other foot. It was a pretty even 1st period until Pens defenseman Alex Goligoski apparently forgot how to skate backwards and Alexander Semin blew past him, fired a perfect shot past Fleury and gave the Caps a 1-0 lead. A few minutes later Ovechkin received a slashing penalty and you would've thought the Penguins just tied the game when it was announced that he was the one getting the penalty. The Penguins powerplay did what it does best, not score, and the period ended 1-0 in favor of the Caps.
The Caps came out of the locker room and into the second period like they were shot out of a cannon. I grabbed my iPhone and got my camera ready, as I could tell a goal was probably going to be scored soon... and I was right. Forty two seconds into the period, Mike Knuble (former Wing whooo!!!) fired a shot at Fleury that he should have easily had, but it trickled through and into the net. Ovechkin, who had been charging for the loose puck before it went in, jumped and slammed himself into the glass in celebration of the goal. Unfortunately, when I took the picture, it all came out as a blur, soooo... no pic. Sorry.
The Pens came back though. A Mike Knuble penalty (former idiot Flyer) went off for holding. None of the Penguins seemed to be able to hit the net until Sidney Crosby wristed in his league leading 48th goal of the year. The place went nuts and the Penguins were back in the game... until 21 seconds later when Tomas Fleischmann received a pass from Alexander Semin and ripped it past Softie McFleury. Just like that, the crowd was out of the game again and speaking of out of the game... shortly after Semin passed the puck to his teammate, Max Talbot threw an elbow into Semin's face knocking him to the ice. As the over enthusiastic announcer read off the Crosby goal, Semin laid on the ice holding his head. Now every team has its "bad fans", but the Penguins seem to have a lot of very bad, outspoken fans that really need to chill. One fan not far from me was yelling, "Get up!! Get up you bum! You're not hurt you, f****t. Get up!" Really dude? Then when Semin got to his feet, the trainers helped him back to the Washington bench, a lot of the Pens faithful booed him. You're booing an injured player, Pittsburgh? Really? I'm not exactly Alexander Semin's biggest fan either, but booing an injured player is disgraceful and ignorant. Semin wasn't the only player leaving the game either. Coach Bylsma yanked Fleury and put in backup Brent Johnson. Fleury smashes his goalstick as he now sits in the runway leading to the Pens locker room and watches the rest of the game from there.
The Pens did manage to get back into the game once again when Jordan Leopold blasted one from the blue line that hit off a Caps players' foot and into the net. They nearly tied it when a Sergei Gonchar blast smashed off the crossbar. Before the period expired, former Penguin Matt Bradley scores a nice deflection goal with Brent Johnson having no chance. The Caps regained their two goal lead, 4-2.
During the second intermission, I looked around at a few souvenir stands, hoping to get something for the kids, but everything was way overpriced. Its bad enough that professional sports teams gouge their fans for tickets just to get in to see a game, but do they have to gouge us for money inside the arena/stadium too? How about making things affordable for us normal people that love, fund and support YOUR franchise?
Anyways, back to to the game. Despite only giving up 2 goals, Caps goalie Semyon Varlamov looked beatable. Toward the end of the second period, he looked as though he was fighting the puck and if the Pens could get some shots on him early, they could get back in the game again... and they did. Forty nine seconds into the period, Jordan Leopold scored, pulling the Pens within 1 goal again. At this point, the Pens should have just started throwing pucks at the net because Varly looked rattled. Unfortunately for the Pens, Pascal Dupuis fired a shot wide of the net, breaking the glass (the same glass Ovie was blasting earlier) behind Varlamov. There was a 10 minute delay in the game to fix the glass, killing the Pens momentum. While they were fixing the glass, it was announced the Sidney Crosby recorded his 100th point of the season on the Leopold goal. All of the fans, scratch that, MOST of the fans gave Sid a standing ovation and started chanting "M-V-P, M-V-P!" I didn't agree with that and neither did someone else in the building... the current reigning league MVP, Alexander Ovechkin.
This ovation for Crosby, just ignited Ovechkin who has been struggling to score goals lately. Bill Guerin received a high sticking call giving the Penguins their first penalty of the game. Ovechkin just needed 4 seconds. Backstrom won the face off, Ovie picked it up, moved into the slot before anyone else could even blink and fired it past Johnson, restoring the Caps 2 goal lead. It was Ovechkin's first goal in 5 games. He wasn't done yet. On his next shift, Ovie showed off another side of his game, his physical side. He slammed Max Talbot into the boards, crushed Kris Letang a few seconds later, then leveled Jordan Staal right in front of where we sat. My buddy Dave exclaimed, "Oh man, Ovie's a beast! He's destroying everybody out there right now." I smiled and quietly clapped my hands and chanted in my head "M-V-P". Watching Ovechkin brought back memories of Mario Lemieux and how he would just take over a game and there was no stopping him. Just like with Mario, I found myself no longer following the puck, but following the player. You just knew Ovie was going to do something awesome with or without the puck.
With a few minutes left, the Pens pulled their goalie and Ovie was on the ice. When he got the puck, Pens fans were irate, "STOP HIM!!! You can't let HIM score!" Gonchar dove to the ice to knock the puck off Ovechkin's stick which he did with 6 seconds left. However, Ovechkin, with Nicklas Backstrom's help, managed to get the puck back a few seconds later and was all alone with the empty net. I looked up at the clock and it read 1.2 seconds, with all the fans cursing his name, he cruised towards the empty net as if he had all night. I slipped up just this one time and yelled, "Shoot now you idiot!!" Ovechkin buried it into the empty net with 0.2 seconds left on the clock. He was now tied with Crosby for the league lead in goals with 48. It was the final goal, in the final seconds, of my final game at Mellon Arena. Sorry Ovie, you're not an idiot. I got a little wound up there.
The game was over and the Caps surrounded their goalie while celebrating their 6-3 win and sweeping the Penguins in the season series. As we rode the T back home, a Pens fan was whining about Ovie's empty netter, "I'm so pissed off! You're going to win the scoring title because you can put a puck into an empty net. Aren't you so great?" Just as an FYI, Ovie is 6 points ahead of Crosby in points, tied for first goals and Ovechkin played in 8 less games. He won't win the scoring title because he scores into empty nets, he'll win it because he's better.
Here are the highlights in case you missed it:
So in all likelihood that will be my final time at the Civic/Mellon Arena. Lots of great memories in that building. I witnessed so many events like WWF, NHL Draft, Dane Cook and countless hockey games. I witnessed the greatness of Mario Lemieux. I got to see Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov, Henrik Zetterberg, Nick Lidstrom, Chris Osgood, Pavel Datsyuk, Dominik Hasek and all of "my" Wings in person. I watched Illya Kovalchuk score a game winning goal in the final seconds of overtime. I saw Lemieux and Jagr record their only points of the '96 Eastern Conference Finals in Game 2 of that series. In 2008, the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in that building just a few months after my son Caleb Yzerman Fruscello was born at Mercy Hospital, which is just down the street from the arena. There's a lot of great things to look forward to at the Consol Energy Center though... taking my kids to their first hockey game, taking Caleb to his first Red Wings game, arena football, NHL All Star game, playoff games, wrestling events and most likely another Stanley Cup. It will be sad to see the old Igloo get shutdown, but those of us that were lucky enough to experience it, will have great memories that will stay with us forever.
After I got home on Easter Sunday, I turned on ESPN to catch some of the Yankees-Red Sox opener. The BottomLine had breaking news and was giving us general facts about quarterback Donovan McNabb. I thought, "Oh, so the Eagles traded him afterall. Can't wait to see what they got." I continued to read and was floored when I saw who he was traded to... the WASHINGTON REDSKINS??! Wait a minute... did the NFL realign their divisions again and I missed it? These two franchises are bitter division rivals. Why in the world would the Eagles trade away their pro bowl caliber franchise QB and most successful player in franchise history to a team that plays them at least twice every year? Didn't the Red Sox trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees teach them anything about trading within your division, let alone trading a future hall of famer to your opponent? What did they get in return for possibly the best player in franchise history? Draft picks. Not even a first rounder either. Un-freaking-real.
Sadly this isn't the first time the Eagles and Redskins have been involved the trading of a franchise QB. Back on April 1st (I know, almost to the day too) 1964, the Eagles traded their 30 year old pro bowl QB Sonny Jurgensen to the Washington Redskins. Vince Lombardi called Jurgensen the "best I have seen." The Eagles finished over .500 just once over the next 14 seasons. Jurgensen finished his career considered as one of the finest passers of his time and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983.
Fast forward to today. Under McNabb the Eagles soared to new heights. They finished with 11+ wins in each of his first 5 seasons. In 2004, he lead the Eagles to a 13-3 record and into the Super Bowl for the first time since the 1980 season. He never won a Super Bowl, but he won a lot of games, went to the Pro Bowl 5 times and brought respectably to a franchise that really needed some. Now he's gone. He was given away to a division rival in exchange for some draft picks.
The Eagles do have two younger QB's waiting in the wings with Kevin Kolb and Michael Vick, but as of right now neither could hold a candle to McNabb. Hell, a couple years ago Vick was in jail. Kolb showed some potential last year, but only played in two games. He's supposed to carry the franchise now? If he falters, they'll turn to Vick. So you're going to rely on an ex-con to save your franchise? Does any of this seem dumb to anyone else? To trust your franchise in the hands of an unproven rookie or an ex-con.
Some are saying that the Eagles wanted to do the right thing with McNabb and didn't want to trade him to Raiders or the Bills where he would be miserable. They wanted to trade him to a team that wasn't a disaster. While the Redskins are not exactly the model franchise, they will now be forced to play against McNabb at least twice a year. Trading him within the division is idiocy. My favorite quote is from Andy Reid, "We thought this was the best for Donovan and the compensation was right. We surely took into consideration Donovan's feelings.'' HA HA HA HA!! You took his FEELINGS into consideration? Will he consider your feelings when he's throwing for 300+ yards and 3 TDs against your team? Will he consider your feelings when his Redskins beat your Eagles twice, preventing you from making the playoffs?
This trade won't start a dynasty in Washington, but it will move the Eagles a step closer to becoming the new Detroit Lions. Philadelphia doesn't have a lot of patience and watching their Eagles go from potential Super Bowl contenders to basement dwellers won't sit well with the Eagles faithful. There's an expression, "You don't know what you have until its gone." Well the Eagles are going to find out what they had real quick and maybe 46 years from now that will prevent them from trading another franchise pro bowl QB to the Redskins. Of course, this is the Philadelphia Eagles and there is a reason why they don't own a Super Bowl title.
I currently work at the University of Pittsburgh as web developer for the Health Sciences IT department. I also do a fantasy sports blog for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called "The Fantasy Factor". I'm married to the most beautiful girl in the world (yeah I know, who would have guessed I'd win that title) and have 3 great kids. I'm a huge fan of the NFL, MLB and especially the NHL. I could literally talk to anyone all day about sports.
I have a background in sports writing. I studied to be a sports journalist at the University of Pittsburgh and covered Pitt football for the UPG Press.
Last week Seth Rorabaugh of the PG's Empty Netters wrote a blog post entitled, "What is it?". He wrote, "If someone were to ask us what the Stanley Cup playoffs mean to us, we'd have a hard time giving a simple concise answer". He then goes on to name quite a few memorable moments in playoff history like:
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