Double Play Sports Blog: Power Outage at The Garden

Electric – the common word you here about atmosphere in any sports venue in any sport. The word is truly fitting… until your team comes out and plays like it is a spring training exhibition game and not game 5 of the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals an hour and a half revealing a statue of the greatest single moment of the NHL’s long and storied history (a statue of Bruins great Bobby Orr’s game winning goal versus the St. Louis Blues). In fact, in honor of the statue’s debut… they even played like bronze statues- slow, immobile, and leisurely.
The B’s came out last night and actually started pretty decently, but at the end of the first period the Flyers’ hunger for the win started to show more and more. This Bruins team last night looked as if they have lost all of the swagger they had in the first 3 games - no drive, no hustle, countless lost battles in the corners, and they got beat in nearly every footrace to lose pucks.
Thanks to Tuukka (yes… that’s 2 U’s and 2 K’s) standing on his head a few times they were still in it coming into the 2^nd period down only 1-0. I was feeling good going into the second… I imagined Claude Julien reaming the guys in the locker room during intermission and really inspiring them to win this game. What got my hopes up even more (as bad as this may seem) was the injury to Brian Boucher who made a few incredible saves in the first… or maybe they were lucky ,who knows? Bring in a cold goalie off the bench in a do-or-die game 5 on the road in a packed house of rowdy Bruins fans… I’d bet the house at this point, right? Dead wrong. Leighton saw 3 shots in the second period.
In the meantime, Scott Hartnell (who I’d really would like to pull a Tonya Harding on) scored his second goal of the game followed up by 2 more by Simone Gagne (damn the Flyers are happy to have him back).
I give the following grades for last night:

D- (As much as it pains me to)to Marc Savard who couldn’t hold a puck on his stick for more than 2 seconds, but showed guts and the “we aren’t going down without a fight” altercation in the late 3^rd
C- to Miroslav Satan
B- to Tuukka (gave up one weak goal)
B+ to Vladimer Sobotka for a huge hit on that bitch Danny Briere
F goes to the Referees who missed an elbow from the Flyers’ goalie Leightonin behind the net (amongst many others) and allowed a huge misappropriation of penalty minutes to favor the Flyers (Flyers had 8 PIM while the Bruins had 22PIM)
F goes to Dennis Wideman for a pathetic display last night… I can’t even go into details because I might vomit all over my computer keys if I think about him for another second

A few key points to close:

It is scary to think this MIGHT be the kind of performance the Bruins will have without Krecji and Sturm
My prediction is if they lose game 6, they lose game 7 and blow the 3-0 series lead
This performance was comparable to the total implosion the Celtics had versus the Cavs on Friday, May 7^th in that 124-95 embarrassment
I do remain faithful that the Bruins win this series… they were undefeated at home in the playoffs going into last night in a playoff year that has seen the home team have a sub-.500 winning percentage on home ice.
Finally, I will not be attending a Bruins game for the rest of the playoffs because I am cursed… I’ve been to 3 games this year and they lost each game 4-0…. Weird.