Courtesy of ESPN
Pekka Rinne stopped 32 shots (most of which seemed nearly impossible to stop) and Matt Halischuk became the extremely unlikely overtime hero as the Predators evened the series at 1 with 5:09 left in Double Overtime.
Special Teams:
Powerplay – 0 for 4, 0%
Powerplay For The Series – 0 for 9, 0%
Powerplay For The Playoffs – 6 for 36, 16.7%
Penalty Kill – 1 for 1, 100%
Penalty Kill For The Series – 6 for 6, 100%
Penalty Kill For The Playoffs – 20 for 28, 71.4%
Best Play of the Game: Kevin Bieksa finds himself with a wide open net and finishes the game in overtime!…….wait a second….Pekka Rinne STOPPED it. Amazingly enough, Pekka Rinne finds the puck as it’s in mid-air and sandwiches it between his pads, like trying to catch a bullet between his teeth. The biggest save in Pekka Rinne’s career, by far.
Worst Play of the Game: Roberto Luongo decided to take a bit of a nap in the last minute of the third period and didn’t keep his paddle down on the ice as much as he should have. Suter slipped one towards the net, it bounces off the flakey stick and goes in between his pads to the back of the net, tying the game at 1 and sending it to overtime.
Players (Good and Bad) of the Game:
The Good: Pekka Rinne – My word. Without Pekka Rinne, the Predators would be in an 0-2 hole in this series, probably wouldn’t have beat Anaheim, and probably wouldn’t have made the playoffs
The Bad: NONE – No matter who won this game, both teams played amazingly. There wasn’t an epic collapse anywhere to be found
My Preds #1 Star: Pekka Rinne. If you give it to anyone else, you’re crazy
Synopsis: It’s hard to get much better than the longest game in Predators history ending in favor of Nashville, and you can’t script the movie better than what happened.
Just like in game 5, Nashville is down a goal going into the last minute of regulation, close to going down 0-2 in this best of seven series.
Nashville pulls Pekka Rinne from his net for the extra attacker. Before Pekka Rinne got off the ice, Ryan Suter banks it off of Luongo into the back of the net. So? To overtime they went!
20 minutes go by, unbelieveable saves by Rinne keep the Predators afloat while they try to find a true answer to Luongo, not something that just “slips” past him, a REAL goal.
Double Overtime comes and nearly ends as well, however with about 5 minutes left Nashville received a tied series thanks to…Matt Halischuk? Ask yourself in the next day or two if you know who that is. Ask yourself YEARS from now if you’ll even remember that name. The answer? Most likely no. However, for Preds fans, on the last minutes of April in 2011, he handed them a double overtime winning goal and sent the Predators into a best of 5 series to start the month of May
Next game is Tuesday night at 8:00pm CST in Nashville on Versus/CBC/RIS/SportsSouth
My Prediction for Game 1: 3-1 Predators (Regulation)
Real Outcome: 2-1 Predators (Overtime)
Series Record: 1-1, Tied Series
Thanks for reading!
~KM
