Sens at Land’s End

Now we know: the Sens will play the Penguins in the first round. Ehhhh. I had the Penguins/Flyers game on in the background while I was working on a paper today. If the Penguins had won they’d have finished first overall, but they would have played Philadelphia in the first round. The commentators on TV were speculating that the Penguins didn’t try very hard to win because they want to play the Sens. Crosby didn’t even play — he took the day off.

If it’s true that they threw the game, I’d love to see it come back and bite them, but I understand why they’d rather play the Sens than the Flyers. The Flyers are goons and by playing them you risk serious injury or death; the Sens have struggled lately and are without Alfie and Mike Fisher. They’re now saying Alfie may be out for a month at least. The Penguins are the only team in the East or maybe the whole league, in my opinion, whose best scorers might actually match or better Ottawa’s and now they have former Sen (former favourite player of mine who was traded for current favourite player of mine) Marian Hossa as well. This could be a problem. I’m slightly concerned about the fact that the Pens might possibly get a bit of preferential treatment from the officials because of their position as “The New Face of the NHL.” Also, they dive.

As much as I did not like the idea of playing Washington, I was starting to think it might be a good thing because the Sens would know going in that they couldn’t play the way they did in the regular season and win against them. It might have been a good way to force them to change their game. They did fairly well against Pittsburgh in the regular season so now they might not have that wakeup call. I just don’t know. Hopefully someone will tell the players that the Penguins might have thrown their game today to get to play them. That should piss them off.