So we’ve just had a major battle against Pittsburgh and it seems that we´ll also play against them in the first round of the playoffs. We won 6-4 at their home venue on Saturday but it was a hard-fought game. It was pretty rough… lots of fighting and also abusing.
Toward the end of the game the two coaches almost started their own fight, too. They were standing at the edge of their benches, making gestures. When one watches it now, it looks almost funny but at the moment everyone was controlled by strong emotions.
People can say things like this should not happen but I’m not surprised Peter Laviolette lost his cool. On the contrary, it’s a good thing – at least one can see how much he cares about our team, how he breaths for us. He wasn’t okay with a rough tackle on our key player Danny Briere, that’s why he went mad.
Otherwise the victory was a valuable scalp for us, especially as we had already been losing 0-2. I’ve read somewhere that this was the tenth time in this season when we succeeded in gaining points after being down by two or more goals. It’s a nice stat but there’s no guarantee it will always work this way. So we have to be careful about these poor beginnings.
One can say that the playoffs have already started for both the teams, one could see that on the ice. The game was extremely rough, it was clear that there’ a lot at stake. Even though both the teams have secured the playoffs, both of them want to start at home.
And that’s our main goal now, as I’ve said before. It’s become clear that the first place is no longer in our reach, we can’t get past the Rangers. So our number one task now is to get in front of the Penguins and end up fourth. If we can do that, we will start the fight for the Stanley Cup at home. And that I consider to be a big advantage. It seems clear at the moment that we’re going to play the first round with the Pens so it’s only about who’s going to start at their home venue.
Of course there´s going to be a lot of talk about my long history with the Penguins before the series starts. Everyone will be asking me how special the situation is for me, especially after all that what was written during the last summer… But I don’t want to go back to that, I´ve already explained a good many times why I chose the Flyers.
And it’s history for me. I’m looking toward the future now and I´ll do my best to help us beat the Penguins. We´ll have one more game with them on Saturday, it’s the very last game of the regular season and it’s possible that it will be only this game that will decide who is going to have the home-ice advantage. So I expect a really tough game. And that they will boo at me? I´ve got used to it, I really don’t care.
Jakub Voráček is doing great, he’s on a hot streak now, only this Sunday he scored twice. I hope it will last! At least one of the two of us scores - I haven’t had much success recently. But I hope this will change at the right time. The main thing is that the team is doing well – because there are still a lot of things to work on.
Even though we keep winning, we are not playing such a great hockey in all the games. The problem is this may not be enough in the playoffs. It’s good that we´ve realized this and that we still have something to play for. The worst thing is to be finishing the regular season without passion, like there´s nothing at stake any more… This tends to be extremely tricky.
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