Friday, August 29, 2008

He shoots he scores... Ladies and Gentlemen Janne has just left the building




Here is a quick video with 3 different Janne goals, all very nice, and I wanted to go through each of them and give some take home thoughts about them...

1. After watching this goal, all I can think about all the times in the playoffs that guys on our team had the puck all alone in front of the goal and didn't score. This is not only the obvious goto guy Pascal Dupuis, but there were several times that I remember Marian Hossa (the god we can apparently not live without according to most sports writers) not being able to capitalize on great opportunities. Overall, to me, this was a problem for us in the playoffs, being able to capitalize off rebounds with skill. I know we got a couple of rebound stuffs as goals, but those are not always available, sometimes you need to have the patience and skill to get the puck off the rebound and do something with it. If Janne can keep this up here, I think he could be a valuable asset on Sid and Satans line, rather than somebody like Fedetanko or Malone, who will just stand in front of the net and make trouble (not that there is anything wrong with that).

2. Shoot outs, what can you say... Not that big, but if you really think about it, this year we lost 3 of our biggest shoot out performers, in Ruutu, Christiansen and Armstrong. Whether you like shoot outs or not, they are a new part of the game, and having somebody who can perform and help you get 2 points instead of 1 is nice. From this video, obviously the goal tending is probably not at NHL level, but it looks like he has some skills in moving around there, so he may end up being a good asset as the season goes on.

3. Three words for you... Finnish, Finnish, Finnish... and i'm not talking about a citizen of Finland. Anyways, I see this as one of the biggest problems the young Penguins roster has. You even see this a lot in Malkin, but more specifically in guys like Kennedy, Dupuis, sometimes Sykora. We get these excellent opportunities against the goalie, and we just have trouble finishing. Sadly, in situations like these where we have breakdowns, we sometimes don't even get the puck to the goal. Seeing this kind of takes some edge off about the rumors of Janne not being able to grind his way to the goal, and from what I know about him it seems that he is a scorer, so he is going to get the puck to the net by any means necessary.

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