sounds like a deal, nick like sid can break through 5 people on the ice yet still cannot score.
so staal just signed a contract and therefor is a likely trade option… yet, talbot just signed a contract and is therefor off the trading block???
talbot>>>>>>>staal
i just think more team would like staal instead of talbot.
ok whats the thoughts on tonight. Ill do the list they need to do to win
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shoot shoot shoot- not enough shooting the puck, too many passing
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hit hit hit- we have cooke, godard, and bisonette in the lineup
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Stop the guy with the puck- when its 5 on 5 someone should be covered at all times
discuss!
Looking good so far 
The neutral trap was working for us tonight and the Cooke-Crosby-Malkin line was really clicking well. We pretty much controlled every aspect of that game.
Very nice win tonight, I like the grinder-playmaker-scorer setup on Line 1.
Cooke, Crosby, Malkin…Lemieux, Jagr, Stevens? looked awesome tonight even despite the flukey goal, seemed like everyone knew what they needed to do and got it done. except hal gill obviously still sucks haha
Yeah we looked real good. Everyone worked hard and looked like they were on a mission. I liked the “new system”, it really limited what Philly did. I just hope they realize they are still in a slump and need to string together a little streak to get back in the playoff pack.
weird that you didnt include passing in your little game plan. it seems like a lot of times when teams dont move the puck and play like a bunch of individuals they lose… ya know?
thye pass to much at times… look how many giveaways theres been… when you want them to pass they dont when you dont want them to pass and shoot they continue to pass
:doh:
I agree with bics… they know they need to piece together some wins and getting a big division win against the Flyers in Philly is hopefully just what we need to get back on the right track…
That last part of the sentence made me think of Matt Foley: “You’re probably thinking, ‘Hey Matt, how can I get back on the right track!?!?’”
HAHA
pretty good article on the Pens
No pain, no gain for Pens? We’ll see
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By Scott Burnside
ESPN.com
Sidney Crosby is listed as day-to-day after injuring his knee against WashingtonTags: NHL, Pittsburgh Penguins, Sidney CrosbyBurnside Blog: Crosby Injured
PITTSBURGH – It’s a short walk from Shales Café to Pizza Milano on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh, in the shadow of the steel framework that will become the new home of the Pittsburgh Penguins in about 20 months.This is the heart of Penguin Nation, and regardless of where you go these days, the mood is consistently dark.
Fans have been calling for blood for weeks now, but after a 6-3 throttling at the hands of the visiting – and, dare we say, hated? – Washington Capitals on Wednesday, that bloodlust is at a fever pitch.
Coach Michel Therrien is at the top of the list (isn’t the coach always at the top of these lists?), although others follow in short order, including GM Ray Shero (why didn’t he sign Marian Hossa? Or Ryan Malone? Or someone else?), Miroslav Satan (he’s no Marian Hossa), Marian Hossa (turncoat), hometown boy Malone (he signed a seven-year deal with Tampa Bay that we’re pretty sure he’d sell his liver to void now) and assorted others.
“It’s hard for everybody because we feel we’re better than we’ve played,” Shero told ESPN.com in an interview this week.
The Penguins woke up Thursday morning in 10th place in the Eastern Conference, just one point out of the final playoff spot. Rarely, though, has one point loomed as large given that everyone and their dog believed the Penguins were a lock to make the playoffs for the third straight season after advancing to the Stanley Cup finals last spring.
Yet Pittsburgh is an interesting case study, possibly the perfect illustration of how short-term pain may be a necessary evil in the new NHL, even for the game’s elite teams. That’s not going to make the folks at Shales Café or Pizza Milano happy, but the rocky road the Pens are traveling this season has camouflaged the notion that this still is a team capable of being a contender for years to come
PuskarMichel Therrien and the Penguins are 2-8-0 over their last 10 games.
At least, that’s the theory.
Let’s start with this.
Any team that boasts the NHL’s top two scorers (Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby) and solid secondary talent like Jordan Staal, Ryan Whitney and Marc-Andre Fleury should make the playoffs. And it says here the Penguins will indeed be a playoff team come mid-April, despite a prolonged slump that has seen them lose six of seven at home and go 9-16-1 since a torrid start to November.
They’ll get veteran defenseman Sergei Gonchar back in about a month. His loss from the defensive corps and dressing-room community has been devastating. Couple that with Whitney’s long absence due to foot surgery (he scored his first goal of the season Wednesday night), and it’s ample evidence why the Penguins are 25th in goals-against per game. Last season, they were third in the conference in that important category.
“Not having Gonchar is huge in the room, too. He’s a leader in his own way,” former Tampa Bay Lightning GM Jay Feaster told ESPN.com this week.
One thing leads to another, and without Gonchar and Whitney, the pressure on Marc-Andre Fleury to be sensational in goal has increased exponentially. After a terrific start to the season, he has, frankly, been just ordinary, with a .904 save percentage and 3.01 goals-against average (35th among NHL netminders). Last season Ty Conklin performed miracles when Fleury was hurt, but Conklin is in Detroit, and backup Dany Sabourin hasn’t provided the points to keep the Pens in the playoff bracket.
“They’re just not getting the same kind of goaltending,” Feaster said. “That’s just a bottom-line thing.”
The goaltending numbers should improve, though, when Whitney gets back into a groove and Gonchar returns, and there is the benefit of having youngsters Alex Goligoski and Kris Letang play a lot more than they might have otherwise.
Up front, though, is where much of the criticism falls at the feet of Shero.
You don’t have to go too far to find folks, inside the game and out, who are less than enamored of Satan. He’s a proven goal scorer but has never been high on the list of intangibles like character and heart.
The fact Satan (just 16 goals) has failed to jell in a meaningful way with Crosby suggests Shero made the right call by offering Satan just a one-year deal, although that fact often gets lost amid the criticism that Satan is here at all.
Could Shero have had Michael Ryder, who is enjoying a renaissance in Boston? At the time of Ryder’s signing last summer, the Bruins were criticized for extending a three-year, $12 million deal to a guy who was a healthy scratch in Montreal, so it’s hard to criticize Shero for taking a pass.
How about Kristian Huselius? Not much of a bargain in Columbus, where Huselius is on pace for fewer than 30 goals after signing a four-year deal at $4.75 million annually. Radim Vrbata got a three-year, $9 million deal out of Tampa, but he was so miserable that they sent him home to the Czech Republic. And of course, there’s the granddaddy of contract gaffes, the four-year Sean Avery debacle in Dallas.
Malone was a big part of the Pens’ success last season, bringing a nice blend of toughness and scoring (he had 27 goals), and Feaster said the lack of team toughness is one of the biggest differences between last season and this campaign. Yet Shero could not have touched the seven-year, $31.5 million deal Malone signed in Tampa. Even if he’d paid $3 million to $4 million annually for three or four years, it would have made it more difficult, if not impossible, to lock up Staal, as he did a few weeks ago. Staal, at age 20, is a significantly more important long-term asset than the 29-year-old Malone.
Which brings us to Therrien.
The Penguins coach is the lightning rod for criticism in Pittsburgh, yet we admit a bias toward the crusty Montreal native. We loved how he called out his players when he first arrived in Pittsburgh in December 2005, suggesting they were overpaid and, at times, trying to be the worst defensive team in the NHL. What he has accomplished in Pittsburgh during the period since is nothing short of miraculous.
Critics will suggest anyone could coach a team with talent like Crosby, Staal, Malkin, Whitney and Fleury. That’s simply not true. Lots of talented teams don’t get to the Stanley Cup finals. Just ask Ron Wilson, who couldn’t get the San Jose Sharks over the hump the past few seasons. There are rumors Crosby is at odds with Therrien, yet sources close to the team tell ESPN.com that simply isn’t the case.
“
We didn’t lose everything in a month. … In a month, I didn’t become a dumb coach. I didn’t lose any faith in my players. Sometimes, we lose our focus, but not our skill.” – Pens coach Michel Therrien
Having Crosby on board is crucial – just as it is crucial that Alex Ovechkin and Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau share a vision in Washington, or that Jarome Iginla buys into what Mike Keenan is selling in Calgary. If other players have issues with the coach, well, that’s life. Show us a coach players universally love, and we’ll show you players holding a putter on April 15.
Therrien shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t read or listen to the voices who suggest Pat Quinn and others are ready to take his place behind the Pens’ bench. “Honestly, I don’t read much of what goes on,” he said.
He pointed out he sometimes employs a power-play unit whose oldest player is 23 (Goligoski).
“It’s probably the youngest power play in the league, but people don’t recognize that,” Therrien said. "But as a coach, I do. With young leadership, I think they’re learning through adversity. There’s no doubt in my mind it’s going to make us a better team. It did last year, it did two years ago.
“We’re definitely challenged as a team. I’m challenged as a coach.”
Crosby, for one, appears to agree.
“It’s easy to be a good teammate when things are great, so we’ll have a good test here for the group we have, and I think we’re confident we’ll stick together, we’ll get out of it,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone doubting that. I think we’re all confident with our chemistry that we’ll find ways to get things back on track.”
Trial by fire? You bet. But Therrien has been reminding them they are still a team that has had great success in the not-too-distant past.
“We didn’t lose everything in a month. That’s what I told the players,” Therrien said. “In a month, I didn’t become a dumb coach. I didn’t lose any faith in my players. Sometimes, we lose our focus, but not our skill.”
Since the end of the lockout, none of the teams that have competed in the Stanley Cup finals has won a playoff round the following season. Carolina and Edmonton both missed the playoffs in 2007, while Ottawa and Anaheim were both dispatched in the first round last spring.
The challenge for the Penguins is to avoid becoming a team like Ottawa, which has fallen precipitously in the short period since its first trip to the Cup finals in 2007 and is closer to being a draft lottery team than a playoff team.
Shero has locked up his core pieces – Whitney, Fleury, Crosby, Malkin, Brooks Orpik and Staal – for the long haul, and has done so at an impressively economic level.
Feaster noted that if the Penguins just make it to the playoffs and push a team to six or seven games, maybe that’s a good outcome for them this season given all of the factors at play. It doesn’t mean they aren’t positioned to return to contender status quickly.
“It may just be that maybe it’s not going to be your year,” Feaster said.
The issue for Shero, predicted Feaster, will be to resist the temptation that comes from external pressure to do something rash.
“I think the biggest challenge Ray has is [to] have patience,” said Feaster. “I think the biggest thing is that you don’t let the pressure around you cause you to throw one of the babies out when you throw the bathwater out.”
You can bank on the fact other GMs will be trying to pry Staal out of Shero’s grasp if the Penguins continue to flounder and pressure mounts to find a true winger to play with Crosby. (Malkin, a natural center, has been playing with Crosby of late.)
“I’ve said all along I have really good faith in the kids in that room,” Shero said. “I believe they trust each other.”
Now we’ll find out if that’s enough.
Scott Burnside covers the NHL for ESPN.com.
Good read.
The Pens got a fever, and the only prescription is more FREE CANDY
[ame=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpBXdefDulU&feature=related”]YouTube - Orpik 4 hits in 15 second in game 3 SCF[/ame]
JACKPOT! Great news to wake up to!
The Pittsburgh Penguins have acquired goaltender Mathieu Garon from the Edmonton Oilers in exchange for goaltender Dany Sabourin, forward Ryan Stone and a fourth round draft pick in the 2011 Entry Draft, it was announced today by Executive Vice President and General Manager Ray Shero.
Garon, 31, has appeared in 15 contests for Edmonton this season posting a 6-8-0 record, along with a 3.17 goals-against average and .895 save percentage. The 6-2, 192-pound goaltender posted a 26-18-1 mark in 47 games with Edmonton last season. He finished the 2007-08 season with a .913 save percentage and a 2.66 goals-against average winning the Oilers’ Molson Cup Award (most three star selections).
The native of Chandler, Quebec has played parts of eight seasons with the Montreal Canadiens, the Los Angeles Kings and Edmonton. Garon recorded a career-high 31 wins during his 2005-06 season with the Kings and posted a career-best .940 save percentage in 2003-04 season with Montreal. Garon has registered a 91-82-3-10 record, along with a .904 save percentage and a 2.84 goals-against average in 199 career NHL contests. He was originally selected by the Montreal Canadiens in the second round, 44th overall, in the 1996 Entry Draft.
Sabourin has posted a 6-8-2 record in 19 games, along with a .898 save percentage and a 2.85 goals-against average this season. The 6-4, 200-pound goaltender recorded career-highs in games played (24) and wins (10) during the 2007-08 season.
Stone appeared in eight career contests with Pittsburgh, including two this season. The Calgary, Alberta native has notched 26 points (eight goals, 18 assists) with Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins this season. He was originally drafted by Pittsburgh in the second round, 32nd overall, in the 2003 Entry Draft.
Taken from pens website
yah this is a awesome deal by shero!!!
Garon is really good… .hes amazing to watch play its like hes some freek of nature with the splits he throughs all the time!! Im hella excited, this should push fleury and give him some real competition!
He is a solid backup and also good for if we wanted to move more towards a 2-goalie rotation. Nice pickup.
Damn, I wish it would have been 3 straight wins…
And im not allowed back in this season. Im 0-3 when I go,
So couple days off for people to get better during the break. Is there a roster freeze during the all-star break?
well that sucked :(, its not like we controlled the 3rd period and fluery made 40 saves or anything… cant take credit off of cam ward though he looked really good but honestly in the 3rd we should of scored atleast 3 goals 
Yeah, cooke should have put that one in the net and then crosby doinked one off of the post. Also, we had a lot of chances right in front, but we never got a clean shot, too many bodies. We did play well though, their goalie just had a great game.