Ducks take Game one.

Watching the game on Monday night I actually thought the Senators were the better team for about 40 minutes and then the Ducks took the game over and basically beat the Senators at their own game. The duck hit everyone in sight and out hustled the Senators to the puck. The Duck's strategy seems to be, take as many stupid penalties as possible and then turn around kill the majority of them. One can only pontificate that the Ducks wanted the Senators to get tired of shooting the puck and having Giguere stop it. If the Ducks want to be a Stanley Cup Champion, however, they must stay out of the box and not take stupid selfish penalties. Playing with fire will eventually cause your team to get burned.

For the game the Senators were 2-7 on the power play but the most impressive part was the Ducks killing a long five on three power play. In the end Ducks won the game by shutting down the powerful Spezza, Heatley, Alfredsson line. Statisically, the top line in the 2007 Stanley Cup playoffs had two measly points during the game.

Paros not Dressed?

The biggest disappointment of the game was the fact that there was no Chris Neil and George Paros fight. In fact the pundits had predicted a fight between the two during game one, hard to get into a fight if one of the combatants is sitting in the stands. I have to admit that I had been waiting patiently all week to see a good tussle between the two heavy weights. The league office will be pleased as the game turned out to be pretty tame as far as nastiness goes. All in all it was a great game with some good hitting, with a lot of up and down the ice play.

The reason I don't even remember Paros playing during the game was the ducks didn't dress him for the game; I confirmed this by looking at the starting line-ups on line. Resident thug and tough guy Brad May played a good game and didn't even suck punch anyone during the game. Also not dressed were Bemidji's own Joe Motzko and Lets Go Mav's Ryan Carter both were healthy scratches.