Pittsburgh owner Mario Lemieux pointed to general manager Jim Rutherford and a series of moves made during the season – including acquiring Phil Kessel from Toronto – as the reason the Penguins won it all.
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“I don’t think there’s any storyline it has to follow as long as you can get back there and win”, Crosby said. “It’s not easy to get here. You’ve got to be ready”. When Vlasic and Braun see Crosby jumping over the boards, they’ll follow him onto the ice.
Win or lose, the Sharks will be playing their last home game of the season at the SAP Center on Sunday and team would like nothing more than to close out the schedule by forcing a Game 7 against a Pittsburgh Penguins team that has outmatched them throughout the series. “It’s all special”, he said. It’s the same when things don’t go his way during a game. Really, that’s the case anywhere at this point in the season.
That trophy joins his two Olympic gold medals and two Hart Trophies, and it gives him the mythical title as best player in the world.
Crosby, Malkin, forward Chris Kunitz, defenseman Kris Letang and goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury are the only Penguins players left from that Cup team.
The Penguins have averaged 39.8 shots on goal in the other four games of the series and they’re putting up 35.2 shots per game in the playoffs. There was no second celebration in the Crosby era – until now.
The reality is that it’s also harder to draw penalties this time of year, as a couple notable no-calls in Game 5 highlighted.
Consider this: On Christmas Day, shortly after the Penguins made the coaching change from Mike Johnston to Mike Sullivan, they had exactly 35 points from 33 games, good for 12th place in the Eastern Conference standings.
No one needs to remind the San Jose Sharks about the difficulties of closing out a playoff series, how each missed opportunity can give confidence to the opponent and plant seeds of doubt in the leading team.
The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the San Jose Sharks to win the Stanley Cup in Game 6. “We are going to have a little party tonight”. But the dominance of the Penguins, not just through the finals but through the entire second half of the season, should not be overlooked.
For the home team, San Jose, it’s a lose and stay home game. That turned out to be the game victor, as Patrick Hornqvist sealed the win late in the third with an empty net goal.
“You dream your whole life for this”, said Kessel, the former Maple Leaf who led the Penguins with 22 points this postseason. “If you do that every night, we have a pretty good chance of winning”. The Penguins are trying to win their fourth Cup in franchise history. It is the Penguins’ fourth Stanley Cup.
They did it by dominating the series from start to finish, with their losses indicative only of an overtime victor and Martin Jones’ brilliance in San Jose’s net.
“The end is like hitting a wall”, Sharks coach Pete DeBoer said. That includes the revelatory emergence of Jones in goal and the emergence of Logan Couture as a clutch player of the first magnitude.
“(But) he’s got no problem with it”, Wingels said.
“It’s just learning how to handle it the right way”, he said.
Twenty seconds later, Sharks forward Melker Karlsson left the game with a leg injury, but he returned before the end of the period.
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The Pittsburgh Penguins return to San Jose to face the Sharks in a pivotal game six match-up. According to war-on-ice.com, the Penguins have had 17 more scoring chances in this series at even strength despite the shot attempts just about even through five games.
