Considering Radko Gudas decided to destroy his own teammate’s knee yesterday in practice, we all knew Philly had a tall hill to climb going into Game 4 without the services of Sean Couturier. Now, with that said, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have made a difference whether that ugly ass, front teeth-missing motherfucker played tonight or not. The back-to-back Stanley Cup Champs flew back to Philadelphia (they went home between games 3 and 4 predictably because Philadelphia is a trash city flooded with trash human beings) and flat out dominated this one all for about maybe two minutes. Just another absolute bloodbath of a game.
Now, before we get ahead of ourselves and start counting our chickens before they hatch, the Penguins still need to win more game to close out this series. As we should all know by now, elimination games aren’t exactly a walk in the park. The Pens will need to come out and bring it just like they have every other game this series (with the exception of game 2) if they plan on closing it out Friday night in Pittsburgh. Then again, I’m pretty sure the nerds over at FiveThirtyEight would have the Pens at a 99.99999% probability of beating the Flyers in Game 5 if they actually did hockey predictions (Sad! that they don’t).
This game was actually so out of hand tonight that this quick cap’s going to suffer for it. So instead of going on and on about how silly the Penguins made the Flyers look (again), I’ll just start the (mostly Sidney Crosby) notes early:
- Sidney Crosby added a goal and an assist tonight to increase his playoffs points total to nine (tied for 1st overall). For comparison’s sake, the Philadelphia Flyers have a total of six goals this entire series.
- With this goal, Sid now has the most postseason points in Penguins franchise history (173). Who’d he pass? None other than Mario Lemieux, of course. Ever heard of him?
https://twitter.com/G_Off817/status/986764335124041729
- One last Sidney Crosby fun fact of the night: He’s now scored at least one goal on all three Philadelphia Flyers goaltenders this series.
The Flyers have used three goalies in this series and Sidney Crosby has scored on all of them.
— Jesse Marshall (@jmarshfof) April 19, 2018
- And finally, let’s dish out a little love to someone I feel is very underappreciated. He isn’t going to find his name on the stat sheet every night, but I think it’s safe to say Brian Dumoulin has very well been the Penguins best defenseman over the past three past postseasons. There was literally one moment tonight where Philly looked like they were going to score late in the first, but Dumo came to the rescue and single-handedly skated the puck out of his own zone while the rest of his teammates looked like they were about to vomit on themselves from fatigue. Feel free to give ya mans some love. Maybe even buy his jersey or something. Shit, we’ll make a shirt.
- #PensIn5
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And that’ll do it for Game 4. Stay tuned for the full recap in the am from Geoff (@G_Off817) per usual.
Go Pens.
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Follow Peep on Twitter: @PeepsBurgh
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