- Strange how I can feel much better after this game than I did after the first game. Simply put: The Sabres are as good or better of a 5-on-5 team than the Flyers right now. The question will be whether or not they will get enough 5-on-5 time in this series for it to matter.
- And that leads me to…. the officiating. It was egregious in the first game, too, and Buffalo won, so all is fair in the end. But seriously? This may be some of the honest-to-goodness worst officiating I’ve seen at any level of any sport. I know that there are those amongst us who think that the referees need to call penalties and that putting the whistles away is a horrible idea in the playoffs. But in the same breath, there were at least a half dozen calls tonight that weren’t penalties in the regular season — that wouldn’t be penalties in your local Timbits or rec league.
- Win or lose this playoff, the Sabres desperately need a second center that they can throw out there behind Derek Roy. Paul Gaustad is great for faceoffs, sure, but Buffalo is leaning on him to play the type of minutes in the type of situations that you need a strong skating NHL center to play, and Gaustad is barely an NHL caliber skater. He does a lot of other things right, but he does not have the balance, speed, or shifting ability to play against the best in the world on a nightly basis.
- Regardless of how bad the officiating was, there were some boneheaded penalties too. Gaustad’s holding the stick penalty while already down a man was a perfect example. Pominville and Montador both took arguably “good” penalties to stop potential breakaways, but how about we let our supposedly all-world, high paid, celebrity goaltender make at least one of those saves, what do you say? Maybe he can redeem himself for letting in the absolutely atrocious third goal.
- I don’t need any more evidence to hate pedantic squirrel Danny Briere, put him on the hate list. Put him near the top. It’s bad enough that he’s dirty, that he dives, and that now he does it for another team, but the over the top celebration which seemed fresh five years ago now seems a bit ridiculous for the oft-injured turd. The puck went off your skate, you obnoxious fart, stop fist pumping like you just Giroux’ed the whole opposition.
- Brian Boucher spent most of the game reminding me of Patrick Lalime, that will bode well for the next few games I think. Does Leighton come in if Boucher struggles? Or back to Bobrovsky?
- Montador continues to drive me nuts. He whiffed on a few stick checks tonight where he needed to take the bottom, and seems all-too-willing to play the cutesy style of puck-movement, dangler’s contest that Philly wants to play. If anything, these last two games are evident that Philly can be emotionally frustrated and do not possess the type of grit to win a battle of the wills against Buffalo. Use that to your advantage. As much as I like Montador’s ambition the last two seasons, I do feel like he can be goaded way too easily, way too often.
- This series is going to be great in Buffalo and I’ve got a great feeling about the next two games. Philadelphia really feels like a front running team to me, and for Buffalo, that’s a good thing.
- The final story line of this series is going to be Ryan Miller. It almost seems tired at this point because it’s something we’ve been examining for what? Multiple years now. But I can’t help but feel like pound for pound Buffalo is the better squad up front. They match up extraordinarily well against the Flyers, and it comes down to the fact that Miller should be better than Philadelphia’s tandem of netminders. If he’s not, it really puts a lot of weight on consideration with whether or not it is a reasonable opinion that he can lead this team to where we want to go.
- The Flyer’s entire offense is based on slot passes. Buffalo did a good job for the most part of holding those off today and last night. It’s tough to score from the slot in the playoffs because it requires a clean play pretty often, and clean goals are hard to come by in the second season.
- What do we know about this series right now? Not a lot, really. Game one seemed like it didn’t make sense in terms of the pure number of changes Philadelphia accumulated but could not capitalize on. Game two was played so often in one team’s zone or another that it was really hard to get a grasp of how the rest of the games play out.
- Prediction: If this because a series that is based on grit, determination, and playing style, the Sabres chances are good. If this becomes a battle of special teams Philly’s chances are good. I know the Sabres penalty kill has looked good so far and the Flyers powerplay bad, but the largest the sample gets, the more I worry that changes.
