What we've seen so far

So, after talking about how I don't watch much of the second round, I started to watch a lot more of the second round. Here's what I've seen.

Pittsburgh-Montréal - These have, largely, been very good hockey games. Yes, the officials have sometimes fallen back into their old habits of giving the Pens every break in the book (see Game 4), but that hasn't stopped the Habs from winning (see Game 4), and all those Pens power play goals don't just come from having way too many PPs - they also come from having a very very good PP unit, because they have many forwards who are very good at scoring goals.

The story of this series has been at both ends of the ice. In the Penguins end, Mike Cammalleri has been putting on a clinic, and when the Pens' defense can figure out how to do something about it, and Fleury has one of his better days, they tend to be okay. When the Pens misstep on the forecheck, Cammalleri or someone similar is off to the races. They say a good team is one that takes advantage of its opponent's mistakes, and the Habs have certainly shown an ability to do that.

On the other end, Jaroslav Halak is some kind of weird X-Man, whose superpower is turning into a brick wall whenever opposing forwards come within five feet of him. Given that the Pens are a team whose entire job is to score lots of goals by putting lots of superstars near the net, Halak's superpower has come quite in handy in frustrating the Pens and pushing this to seven. If he can keep coming up big, he'll give the Habs a good chance to advance to the conference finals. If he turns mortal, all the Pens have to do is remind themselves to forecheck in the neutral zone, fucking, ever, and they'll be moving on. Watch this game tonight.

Boston-Philadelphia - Okay, so, Boston is very clearly a better hockey team here. They dominated the Flyers handily through the first four games of the series - yes, all four: even Game 4, of Simon Gagne's triumphant return and overtime winner to stave off elimination, was a game the Bruins kept battling in and it could easily have gone the other way.

Game 5 was a total meltdown. Yes, it sucks to have lost Krejci, and it'll hurt even more going down the stretch - but that is no excuse to come out like the B's did. They stooped to playing Flyers hockey, and, as it turns out, the Flyers are much better at that than they are. As soon as Gagne scored at the end of Game 4, I said the Bruins would likely find a way to lose Game 5 and then win in 6. I didn't suspect, of course, quite how strongly they would find that way to lose Game 5, but I still believe that if the Bruins settle down and play their game, they'll end the second round of the NHL playoffs tonight.

Chicago-Vancouver - Wow, the Western Conference is better at hockey than the Eastern Conference. This was a great series to watch. It went back and forth, both in the series and in each game, and at no point could you be really sure which team was outplaying the other. A few times, you saw Vancouver totally lose its cool, and that was when Chicago really stepped up - but mostly it was just two good teams with two totally different styles of play competing well.

Hockey is awesome.

I'm glad the 'Hawks moved on, because I like their style better. Watching all of them - Kane, Toews, etc. - is just fun, but I need to specifically talk about how much I enjoy Dustin Byfuglien. He uses his unreasonable size the way hockey players are supposed to: he puts his body wherever the hell he wants it, usually driving to the net with speed, and he scores goals because of it. When Byfuglien is coming, you really want to get out of the way, but you can't, because he's going to score a goal if you do (and, hell, probably if you don't, too). Man, that is exactly the kind of guy I want on my hockey team.

I...watched hardly any of San Jose-Detroit, so I have nothing intelligent to say about it. It seems the Sharks won, yes? Four of the five games? Sharks-Hawks conference final, or something?

Let's go Bruins, let's go Habs, let's go hockey!