So Much For That Idea... Pens Now The 4-Seed

A lot of times, if you look at a game on the surface and on the paper everyone talks about, you'll see two teams that have two different ideas running through their heads at any given moment...

One team is going nowhere, except on vacation, after game 82...
The other team is planning how to get prepared for their playoff run...

One team rests three of its highest-paid players on the last home game of the season.
The other team is resting no one and throwing everything they think they have at an inferior opponent...

What's that silly phrase about "why they play the games somewhere else than on paper...?"

That's what happened when the Pittsburgh Penguins played the Hosting Thrashers Saturday evening at Philips Arena...

The Pens were fighting to stay with the New Jersey Devils in the Eastern Conference race for the 2010 postseason- identical records, identical point totals, and identical ideas...

Keep winning...

The Devils kept up their end of the bargain pounding the Islanders, but for some reason the Penguins ran into an Atlanta team that played in front of a sold-out house and had other ideas.

A chippy, scoreless first period led to an equally chippy second period. In the opening twenty minutes, Evander Kane wanted a piece of Sidney Crosby for perceived-shenanigans. In the second period, Matt Cooke got a piece of Kane.

But Kane got Cooke with a straight right...

"If they take exception to who gets hit out there, does that mean you are supposed to start a fight?" Thrashers head coach John Anderson said after the game. "I don't get it. Crosby is so great for this game, but when you're always around the puck, you're going to get hit a little bit. Every time he gets body checked, does that mean somebody is going to get attacked?

"Cooke came at an 18-year-old. What goes around, comes around. That's all I can tell you."

Followed by a draw between Eric Boulton and Eric Godard...
((HT: SportsSouth/NHL/Hockey-fights.com))

They have a history dating back four seasons...

Brian Little scored on Marc-Andre Fleury to give the Thrashers a 1-nothing lead, and it held up on a night where Todd White, Christoph Schubert, Evgeny Artukhin, Pavel Kubina, and Nik Antropov all sat for one reason or another.

"It's disappointing, obviously," Sidney Crosby admitted after the game. "We had a chance to win out. Now we have to make sure we play a good game tomorrow. Our focus is on the playoffs. We've got to move on."

The Penguins now will face the Ottawa Senators in the opening round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. But the Sens go into the series, and the rest of the season, without Alexei Kovalev. Kovalev suffered a torn ACL in his left knee in an otherwise-useless game against Tampa Bay Thursday night. Recovery time is normally three to four months.

"The bottom line," Crosby says, "is that we've gotta be better. We have an opportunity a lot of teams don't have."