Holy crap the Pens! Also, game day preview.

Did you see that Pens game last night? No? Go download it immediately from CIF Nation (link on the right). Jarkko Ruutu beat the CRAP out of Darcy Tucker (who can't get behind that, am I right??)...

Bugsy Malone took on Mark "I might be drunk" Bell...



And Evgeni "It's Genya, not Geno, damn it!" Malkin put up his first career hattrick.



Plus, Bob Errey said "pile of crap" on national TV and that's always full of awesome. And, and!!! JFK, Geno and Syks put up 3 goals in :48. That's 48 seconds. Which is like, 1 goal every 16 seconds. Wow go Pens. USA Today may have been right!

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God I feel like I was just writing about playing the Candy Canes... oh wait, I was! The 2nd home-and-home series in 4 games. Weird, weird, weird. This doesn't happen often, the back to back home-and-homes, so let's hope some circumstantial juju will help the boys pull a win tonight.

Factors:

• Back in Blueland; 7th man advantage.
• Thrash won the last one.
• In which Kovy had 4 points
• Kovy also has 24 points in 33 games v the Canes, his most against any team
• Team's never won 3 in a row v the Canes.
• They seem to play too passively in the 3rd. This needs to be stepped up to hold onto any leads, and/or (re)gain leads.
  
• Ward and Grahame are both struggling right now.
• All-Star weekend is 3 weeks from now - putting Atlanta into the NHL spotlight, at least in theory.
  
• Thrash are 2nd place in the S/E, 3 points behind the Canes.
  

If the Thrash can win tonight without going into OT and giving the Canes the extra point, they'll be 1 point away from the division lead, with a game in hand. I don't know, can you think of any better motivators to do the damn thing?

Also, cool tip from Ben for tonight's broadcast:

Tonight's game will feature a pretty cool thing on the the TV broadcast. In the second period, the two TV analysts (Darren Eliot for Atlanta and Tripp Tracy for Carolina) will switch booths, and provide some "enemy perspective."

Should make for some good TV...if you can't make it to Philips tonight, be sure to check it out. In Atlanta, the game is on SportSourth.

I still don't know who is in net tonight for the boys in Blue, but I'm assuming Hedberg, since he has the money record against the Canes. Nonetheless, I'll go with Thrash by 1.