Well that was a nice win.  I miss seeing the Mule out there.

Goals were as follow:
Detroit: Ville Leino (Cleary, Filppula); Jason Williams (pp; Kronwall, Filppula); Holmstrom (pp; Datsyuk, Rafalski)
Washington: Matt Bradley (Poti, Gordon); Brendan Morrison (pp; Ovechkin)

Some thoughts (most of these I also Twittered during the game):

• I liked seeing the Eurotwins back together, even if they only joined for one goal, which was on the power play.
• Bertuzzi skated with them even-strength rather than Holmstrom, and I wonder if it’s because he’s slightly more mobile than Homer.  Only slightly.
• Speaking of Bert, he had another decently defensive game, and made a nice effort at the end of the game.
• Osgood gave up a softy at the beginning of the game, but other than that he looked good.
• The defense played much better in front of him this time, though there were still a lot of giveaways–15.
• On the plus side, Detroit had 9 takeaways.  3 of those were by Datsyuk,who, I’m pretty certain had a few more than that.
• Pavel was defensively all over it tonight.  He made a lot of amazing plays.  Including stripping the puck from Ovechkin a few times, the other play that really stood out for me was when he backchecked all 200 feet of ice and attempted to sweep the puck away from Washington as he was clearly gassed.
• Who knew that Holmstrom could wire a shot like the one he scored on?
• Meech made a dumb, dangerous play, slamming Quintin Laing headfirst into the boards.  With the attempts being made by the league to cut back on that kind of hitting, I’m surprised that he got away with a 2min boarding call.
• On the bright side, that penalty kill was incredible.  I loved how they managed to set up what looked and felt like a power play for several seconds.
• Mike Green and Alexander Semin had 2 penalties apiece for Washington, 2 of which led to the Williams and Holmstrom goals.
• I liked how Valtteri Filppula opted to loft the puck into the air over the Caps defense with about 30 or so seconds left in the game, rather than try to shoot it down the rink.  He either would have gotten an empty netter, or at worst, iced it.

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