First and foremost, congrats to Ozzie on his 50th career shutout. He made some huge saves.
Secondly, congrats to the Detroit Red Wings, for not following this trend.
Goals were as follows:
Detroit: Henrik Zetterberg, (pp; Datsyuk); Tomas Holmstrom (Datsyuk, Bertuzzi)
Boston: none
- Doug Janik was called up from GR to fill in for an ill Rafalski and played a decent game. He had 13:56 in 18 shifts, with 2:09 on the PK. He wore Samuelsson’s old #37. Babcock “thought he did a real good job, was real stable. I thought he was good on the penalty kill.”
- I said on Twitter, “Other than when he got pasted against the boards twice in the beginning of the game, I haven’t noticed Leino at all.” And even then I probably only noticed because he’d lost his bucket on the hit. It’s certainly irritating to see players like Helm and Maltby come back on fire after being scratched and to not have Leino respond in a similar fashion. He needs to step it up, and take hold of the opportunity granted to him with Filppula out.
- Detroit was outshot 26-29, and lost the faceoff battle 36 to 25. The win (and shutout) is more important, but they need to do better in the faceoff circle.
- It’d sure be great if Versus wouldn’t cut immediately to a commercial when a penalty is called. I like to see the play, and also hear the call from the official. Matt from On the Wings pointed out that someone watching a game for the first time, or a casual fan won’t ever learn anything if they can’t see why the calls are being made. Football always shows the announcement of the penalty. Instead, Versus just leaves us to trust that the play-by-play guys will get around to mentioning it, or that you’ll pick up the call from the arena announcer. Pathetic.
- Z’s goal was great. Pavel technically lost the faceoff, but Zetterberg just pounced on the puck and whacked it in.
- Datsyuk assisted on both goals, the second a gorgeous little backwards pass to Homer, who was trailing. After coming back from his upper body injury on 10/22 in Phoenix, he’s 2-8-10 in 6 games.
- Holmstrom’s apparently now scored a goal against every single team in the league.
- The Bruins have been a little anemic lately, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this was a good effort by the Red Wings. There are, of course, things to improve upon, but when you look at the lineup that played yesterday, well, I’m not going to complain too much.
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This showed up in the mail today and has me bouncing off the walls in anticipation. I’m going to get to see the Red Wings at least 4 times this year due to an East coast swing, and that makes me very happy indeed.