Associated Press
PITTSBURGH ó So much for the talk a team as young as the Pittsburgh Penguins couldn’t advance this far in the playoffs. So much for the speculation Marian Hossa couldn’t score big postseason goals.
So much for the New York Rangers, too, whose decided edge in experience meant nothing in a five-game series in which the Penguins’ superior talent repeatedly made the difference.
Hossa scored his second goal of the game 7:10 into overtime and the Penguins rallied after giving up a two-goal lead to beat the Rangers 3-2 on Sunday and advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in seven years.
Sidney Crosby began a rush into the Penguins end with a pass to Pascal Dupuis, who attempted to give it back to Crosby. The puck trickled away but ended up on Hossa’s stick, and he beat Henrik Lundqvist from the slot for his fifth of the playoffs to end New York’s season. The Penguins won the second-round series 4-1.
“Sid was driving hard to the net and it kind of bounced off him and the puck just came up to me, and I just tried to shoot at the net ó and it was a lucky one,” Hossa said.
The Penguins, the conference’s worst team two years ago, will meet the cross-state Philadelphia Flyers, the conference’s worst team last season, in the first all-Pennsylvania conference final. The teams haven’t met in the postseason since the Flyers’ six-game victory in a 2000 second-round series best remembered for Philadelphia’s five-overtime win in Game 4, which occurred eight years to the day Sunday.
“You want a rivalry, there’s one right there,” Crosby said of the oft-contentious season series in which Philadelphia won five of eight. “It doesn’t get any easier.”
Hossa had only 13 goals in 55 playoff games before these playoffs, and general manager Ray Shero was asked repeatedly if he worried about that lack of production when he picked up Hossa and Dupuis from Atlanta at the trading deadline several months ago.
“For a guy that’s been criticized and known for not scoring big goals in the playoffs when it’s clutch time, obviously he scored an unbelievably big goal,” Dupuis said.
Make that two goals. There was a bit of a revenge factor as Hossa and Dupuis were with Atlanta last year when the Rangers swept the Thrashers in the first round.
“I had some bad playoffs and I had some good playoffs, I can’t control what other people say about my playoff performance,” Hossa said. “I always try and I’m on a great team right now.”