Well, the better-skilled team finally won out, despite going down to us 3-1. Let's start with them. It's no secret that they figured out how to get a few past Lundqvist. But mostly, their scoring came not because Hank wasn't "a god," but because Ovechkin kept his team firing. Green was again fairly useless, but people like Backstrom and Semin were fueled by Ovechkin's fire. It wasn't so much goal-scoring they relied on him for as it was an offensive drive - he was the reason all the big plays happened in the first place.
But enough about them.
We came out flat, as usual. Drury's statistics notwithstanding, his quiet demeanor was not enough to captain this team into giving a shit about their game. For the first 10 minutes, we barely held the puck at all - and by then, I already knew the game was over. Gomez and Drury had solid games, but nothing spectacular - nothing good enough to get a team pumped or build on.
Meanwhile, people like Naslund, Antropov, and Zherdev, as usual, underperformed. While Antropov was characteristically solid defensively, none of these guys seemed to know what to do with the puck. Veterans like Naslund are supposed to be immune to the nerves that completely take a team over in the playoffs, but these are the guys that seemed totally stunned by what they were doing.
Torts has been saying for a while now things like "our best players have to be our best players," "We're not gonna win if Sean Avery is our best player," "We're not gonna win if our kids are our best players." Well, Sean Avery, Brandon Dubinsky, and Ryan Callahan were our best offensive players. Torts was right.
Defensively, we played solidly enough getting in the way - our reactionary defense was fine, even from such as Redden. But once we got to the pucks, we gave them right back up, so the theory of "play defense by not letting them have the puck" gave way to "play defense by scrambling to get in the way" - which was exciting every time it worked, but just keeps leading to giving the puck right back. For every time Redden did something right to get in the way of the puck, he did something else wrong to give it back.
Look, it's no secret that we got where we are because of a stellar PK and a stellar goalie. I don't wanna sound sour on this, so I'm not gonna harp on it - good teams find a way to win, no matter what - but we were killed by the Caps power play. Sure, some calls were questionable, but that's not the point. Not having Betts hurt us more than anyone who will write anything about this game realizes. Our PK was significantly weakened, and while Lundqvist played what I thought was a solid game, and I'd (as ever) call him blameless again, he was not, in fact, superhuman. And unfortunately, our skaters needed him to be to give us a chance.
Among Staal and Girardi still not quite shaking off the nerves of the playoffs, Betts being out of the lineup, and Lundqvist not being supernatural, our defense was weaker than usual. A total lack of offense from the guys that should be our star players put the puck in their hands too often, and they're too dangerous on offense, even when we are at our defensive best. Plus, they were on fire, led by Alex Ovechkin, at home, in a Game 7. They remembered what that meant, and we couldn't get the requisite effort forth. So, they get Pittsburgh and we get golf.
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