I'm Seeing Stars

Well. The match-ups for the conference finals are decided. It’ll be an “All-PA” final in the east, and Deetroit gets the Stars. The conference finals begin Thursday. I said I wanted the Stars - Sharks series to go seven games and I got my wish, after a fashion. I just didn’t think Game Six would run on into Game Seven, and continue nine minutes into Game Eight. From the Dallas Morning News:

The new leadership of the Dallas Stars planted a stake in the ice at American Airlines Center early Monday morning.

Marty Turco came up with a career-best 61 saves, and Brenden Morrow scored his third career postseason overtime goal as Dallas survived the third-longest game in franchise history and defeated the San Jose Sharks, 2-1, to end their best-of-7 Western Conference semifinal in six games.

"Tonight was as fitting as anything I’ve ever seen in sports that Brenden got that winning goal,’’ Stars coach Dave Tippett said of a game that ended at 1:24 a.m. and started five hours and 14 minutes before.

Morrow redirected in a Stephane Robidas pass on the power play to score at 69:03 of overtime. It was his seventh goal in the playoffs this season and underscored what he has meant to a Stars team that is advancing to the Western Conference finals for the first time since 2000.

I was there for the whole thing (and I stayed awake, too), which ended at 0024 hrs, my time. You know there were some tired-ass folks dragging in to work all over Dallas this morning…tired, but happy. For a while, anyway. Also from the Dallas Morning News:

Expect the early spotlight to be on Stars goaltender Marty Turco and the Red Wings' skilled young forwards.

“We saw the last series was tough,” Turco said. “This is going to be even tougher.”

Turco is 2-10-5 against the Red Wings and hasn’t won at Joe Louis Arena since his college days, when he was wearing Michigan’s maize-and-blue.

One of Turco’s two wins came this season, a 1-0 shutout at the American Airlines Center.

“That's one team that's had my number,” Turco said at the time. “It's going to take a while to catch up, but that's my goal.”

Two of the reasons why Turco – and for that matter nearly the entire NHL – has struggled against the Red Wings are forwards Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg. The two have combined for 74 goals and 189 points this season.

Their skill and puck possession will present an extreme matchup for the Stars' young defensemen. Detroit won three of the four head-to-head meetings this season, outscoring the Stars, 12-5.

Zetterberg has three goals and 21 point in 18 career games against the Stars. Datsyuk has been similarly productive, with nine goals and 19 points in 19 games.

"When you watch Zetterberg and Datsyuk go out there and dominate the game, that's frustrating," Tippett said after a 5-3 loss in Detroit on March 13. "These guys are setting the bar for the Western Conference, so we better raise our bar. We better raise our bar, or we're in trouble."

If the Stars didn’t have enough to worry about, 6-3, 220-pound Johan Franzen had nine goals in four games against Colorado, breaking a long-standing record held by Gordie Howe.

The Stars have three full days and part of another to recover from their grueling win before they face the buzz-saw that is Detroit. They’re tired, you can be sure of that. You can also be sure they’re somewhat beat-up, coz this was a very physical series. Yet Big D has Big Mo going into Hockeytown…and a goalie who’s both confident and playing his best game in years. This ain’t gonna be a cake-walk for the Wings, even though some folks are predicting the Wings in five. I’m thinking more like Wings in six, and the great majority of the 7,500+ people taking ESPN.com’s poll agree with me:

8) Which team will win this series?

45.5%Red Wings 4-2
20.9%Stars 4-3
13.8%Red Wings 4-1
9.3%Stars 4-2
7.3%Red Wings 4-3
2.2%Red Wings 4-0
0.5%Stars 4-0
0.5%Stars 4-1

Total Votes: 7,531

Other polls… This early NHL.com poll is interesting, innit? And I love the mouse-over map you get when you take the ESPN poll at the top of this post (ya gotta take the poll at ESPN’s NHL page to see the map, though). Here are a couple of screen caps of the results I got this morning from the respective polls (click for larger):

These polls mean nothing, other than counting up how many fans of the respective teams took the time to vote. But I see some truth in the results — I think we’ll see Sidney Crosby and Co. journey to Deetroit for the first game of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. Your mileage most certainly may vary, Gentle Reader.

But first: Dallas. This will be a good, if not great, series.