Saturday, April 18, 2009

Pre-Game Notes for Game 2

- The Rangers might want to start taking it a little easier in practice. Apparently Antropov ran into Hank during a drill yesterday at practice. Hank was supposedly shaken up a bit after the hit and was favoring his left arm for awhile, but he stayed in net for the remainder of practice.

"My neck got hurt a little bit, but it's fine. No problem, it's fine," Lundqvist said after practice.

- Ovechkin on Hank: "He played great [Wednesday] night, he wins the game for them. They didn't have many chances to score goals, but it's the playoffs, and if you do get chances to score goals, you have to use them. We didn't use our chances and we lost the game. Next game, tomorrow, we just have to use our chances, play smart in the offensive zone and be more responsible on our chances."

Ovechkin went on to talk about how the key for the Caps in game two is putting traffic infront of Hank and going to the net hard. I hope that soft rangers defense is ready to actually hit someone.

- Drury is still a game time decision apparently, it's 30 minutes till game time...no word

- It appears Theodore will be in net for the Caps, though Boudreau won't confirm it, another game time decision it appears

- The rangers lost 70% of faceoffs without Drury in game one (still amazed they won). For the most part it looked to the naked eye like Washington was just better, but Torts is doing his best to get in their heads, and those of the refs:

"We were terrible," said Tortorella. "They're a good faceoff team, [Sergei] Fedorov and [Nicklas] Backstrom. I guess my biggest concern is that I just want to make sure that the faceoffs are legal. The tape I watched ... I just hope that the faceoffs are legal, because the tying up and kicking can't be done until the puck hits the ice. And a number of them I don't think were. So that's something we have a concern about."

Hopefully this gets the refs not only looking for any questionable play, but also makes a few Caps players a split second slower on the faceoff for fear of reprisal.

The rangers can not win game 2 if they don't get the faceoffs close to 50/50.

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