by Neate Sager, Out Of Left Field
It's about that time when a person with any sense can't see anything to do with the NHL on TV without having the theme from Meatballs stuck in his head.
Yes, counselor, I am ready for the summer, I am ready for the good times ... if only the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins were not still playing hockey, for at least (and likely) two more games before the unofficial summer solstice in Canada -- which is when NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gets booed during the Stanley Cup presentation.
The Red Wings -- think the San Antonio Spurs with skates, sticks and Swedes, a truly great team that just lacks a great rival and thus comes to seem colourless (having so many Swedes exacerbates the last part) -- have the Pittsburgh Penguins in a vise grip. The young Penguins have reverted to the terrible twos -- they won't eat their vegetables, they go into a mope if they can't have their juice in their favourite sippy cup, and they won't go in the corners, or take the hacks and whacks in the front of the net in order to actually make life difficult for Detroit goalie Chris Osgood, the likely Conn Smythe Trophy winner.
Save for a Jared Staal shot in Game 2 that glanced off the outside of the post, the Penguins have got about as close to scoring as a real-life version of Ben Stone from Knocked Up character would to getting inside any nightclub in Toronto -- never mind L.A. -- frequented by women who look like Katherine Heigl. This has been so ... not... worth... the ... wait.
Hey, I'm just being honest. It's almost become a like a fourth wall in the media up here in Canada, that no one ever mentions that the playoffs drag on for way too long for anyone who doesn't have Zen-like patience or has the dedication of an ultramarathoner (like the matchless James Mirtle) to stick with it for all four rounds. This is coming from a guy who liveblogged Game 7 of the Carolina-Edmonton final two years ago -- on the 19th of motherflippin' June, for pity's sake -- so I've earned the right to bitch and moan.
These playoffs peaked in the early hours of May 12, when Dallas' Brenden Morrow scored in quadruple overtime to eliminate the San Jose Sharks -- the only team who, on paper, might have been able to go toe-to-toe with the Red Wings. The rest has been the end of All The President's Men -- you just needed the stories to start moving across the wire to confirm what you already knew about the Red Wings.
That is not sufficient reason for feeling all hockeyed out, but there's more to it than that. Tom Benjamin, who's never one to pull a punch, wrote the other day, "I can't remember a playoff year with so little tension and so many meaningless games."
Perhaps it's all the white-noise comparisons between the Sidney Crosby-led Penguins and the Wayne Gretzky Edmonton Oilers of 1983, who met their demise against a powerhouse New York Islanders team in a four-game sweep in the Cup final. It's a nice fantasy, but it doesn't hold up against reality. It's already evident that the combination of a salary cap and the going rate for young talent is going to make it impossible for Pittsburgh to keep together Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Ryan Whitney, Staal, et al., and that their chances of duplicating what Edmonton did after that sweep in '83 -- five Cups in seven seasons -- are remote. Pittsburgh's spring might -- and granted, anyone else's guess would be a lot better -- end up looking like one big hazy chimera on some distant night in January 2012 when their stars have been sold off and Crosby is all by his lonesome as the trigger man on a sub-.500 team.
The long and short of it is that as much as people were optimistic this series would help sell hockey in the States -- I even went on the record saying Detroit in seven -- and it hasn't. The Red Wings should finish this off in two more games. It's unfortunate that this has been so lacking in drama that it hasn't been enough to take Canadians away from their gardens and slo-pitch leagues. There, it's been said.
(Now watch the Penguins pump six goals past Chris Osgood tonight. Timing was never my thing.)
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