that's just a cliche to say that the team was not totally brain dead at some point during the game.

the end of the game, eh, every team comes hard with a deficit. pretty rare that two evenly matched teams (or close to it) are not going to see the trailing team dominate possession. chicago came hard as fuck, Q was like "we found our game in the last 10 minutes, needed to be that way from the start." i guess i knew what he meant, but if they played that way all night, they'd have had six or seven bad pinches wind up in their net and also been exhausted.

kings i thought made great adjustments, stuff like darryl and brownie were talking about. a little tighter F1, much better F2 support, F3 over the top providing another wave of pressure. The difference here versus the SJ series is that they also had the defense cheating a little, either to take away a receiver or to deny board space early. Basically they the Hawks make one of two types of plays coming out of their own zone, a hurried decision or a pressured play. That was the idea, I think, and it worked well for a lot of the night.

Chicago did hit a couple of long passes as a result of the adjustment but they didn't kill the Kings. Overall, their spacing was fucked up, all those tight little Barcelona breakouts and shit weren't there. They always have a guy close to the puck on offense (on defense, too, really), but last night they were spread out at times.

I liked the move with the centermen. Stoll had some jump early, he plays well with Williams as we saw when they skated with Ryan Smyth a couple years ago. Kopitar I thought looked a little better physically and paring down his role a little worked beautifully. He concentrated on defense and did the job on Toews's line. It maybe didn't have a huge impact, but it worked well enough, also gave a little shakeup to the lineup (similar to Brown moving down earlier).

I saw Richards and talked to him briefly. Just BS'ed for a second, but one of the radio guys asked what chance we had of seeing him in Game 4, he just said he hoped to play. Not exactly earth-shaking news.