Crosby led Pens humiliate Rangers

January 28, 2009   ·   Derek Felix   ·   Jump to comments

Sidney Crosby and the Pens tormented the Rangers with a dominant third.

For 40 minutes, nothing separated the Rangers and Pens at Mellon Arena. Locked up at one, it looked like another battle between Atlantic rivals would be decided by the next goal.

Instead, Sidney Crosby and the Pens had other ideas outscoring a lackluster Blueshirt team 5-1 doubling them up in shots 16-8 as part of a humiliating third en route to a 6-2 laugher.

It was the kind of brutal 20 minutes that can get a coach fired. Not that Tom Renney needs to worry with our clueless GM asleep at the wheel.

Deadlocked at one on goals by Nikolai Zherdev (first in 14 games) and one-time Ranger Petr Sykora (1 of 2 markers), the freefall started surprisingly when Jordan Staal wasn’t taken off the puck by Michal Rozsival and flipped a harmless sharp angle shot which somehow eluded an asleep Henrik Lundqvist giving the Pens a 2-1 lead 71 seconds into the stanza.

It only got worse from there as the normally reliable fourth line was victimized when Freddy Sjostrom mistakenly went to Crosby, who then dished across for a cutting Kris Letang who moved in and wristed one upstairs from 14 feet out for a two-goal lead 5:07 later.

For two periods, no Ranger had taken a minor penalty with only a battle renewed between enforcers Colton Orr and Eric Godard with the former Isles’ goon getting the decision. But in probably their worst period of the season, they lost discipline taking unnecessary penalties including Dmitri Kalinin’s delay of game which handed the Pens a two-man advantage.

Even the vaunted top ranked PK couldn’t prevent the high powered Pittsburgh attack from increasing the margin to three when Sykora banged one through Lundqvist from Crosby and Ryan Whitney at 10:01.

Just like that, they were down three in a place they rarely win. Marc Staal got one back with a nice finish off a four-on-four rush from Scott Gomez and Markus Naslund slicing it to 4-2 with still 6:05 to play. It snapped a 33-game drought for the brother of Jordan.

Instead of getting any momentum for one last push, the Rangers again came unglued when Kalinin put forth a poor effort failing to recover a Gomez pass allowing Letang to go the other way and undress Paul Mara going forehand to beat Lundqvist, who for some reason didn’t look set. Pascal Dupuis and Crosby assisted at 16:21 putting the contest out of reach.

For good measure, on a night he was banged around and probably wasn’t 100 percent, Crosby put the exclamation point on the victory by taking a Evgeni Malkin feed and blindly roofing a backhand past Lundqvist for his 18th and fourth point of the period with 1:40 left.

The kind a superstar scores. If only the Rangers had one of those. But hey. They passed up on Zach Parise for Hugh Jessiman. They also could’ve had Ryan Getzlaf, Dustin Brown, Mike Richards or Jeff Carter.

You really can’t make it up.

Three Stars:

3rd Star-Marc-Andre Fleury, Pit (32 saves incl. 18-18 in second)

2nd Star-Petr Sykora, Pit (two goals, 4 SOG, plus-two)

1st Star-Sidney Crosby, Pit (goal, 3 assists, 5 SOG, plus-two, 11-9 draws)

Notes: RW Ryan Callahan sat out with the flu. Petr Prucha took his place getting 16 shifts (12:38) finishing with no shots and three hits. … Rangers’ best line was the reunited Zherdev, Brandon Dubinsky and Aaron Voros unit with the trio combining for the club’s first goal early on. Voros played a solid game registering his first point since Dec.14 but missed a great chance to put them ahead on a two-on-one. Setup by Zherdev, he fired high over the net. … One area which failed during second was the power play going 0-for-3.

… Lundqvist played well for two periods but then like the team in front of him had a brutal third permitting five goals on 16 shots allowing six on 33 for 27 saves overall. … Stat of night: Pens blocked 23 shots with the D trio of Whitney (5), Rob Scuderi and Mark Eaton combining for one more (13) than the entire Ranger team (12).

… Rangers (29-17-4, 62 Pts) get two days off before visiting tops in the conference Boston for a Saturday matinee. They remain a point behind the Devils who will visit Beantown Thursday and play host to the Pens Friday making up the two games.