Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins Long-Awaited Playoff Matchup

This article is featured on VERSUS.com as part of their Stanley Cup playoff coverage, and was written prior to game two, as an overview for the series.

It’s been said that a playoff series doesn’t truly start until game two: that’s when both teams have had a game to feel each other out, shake off the rust or get some rest, and truly start to hate each other.

For a perfect example of a series like this we only need to look West where the Chicago Blackhawks and the Vancouver Canucks are certainly proving the sentiment right.

This Eastern Conference series however, has been brewing since long before its stars had played in an NHL game.

When Alexander Ovechkin was taken first overall in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft fans league-wide were expectant of the impact the kid who had played men’s hockey with Dynamo Moscow for four years would have, nearly forgetting the second pick, Evgeni Malkin.

A calendar year and a suspended NHL season later, Sidney Crosby became the most-hyped player to go first overall, and became the new “child of destiny”—in other words, before Ovechkin even got a chance, Crosby was seen as the player who would immediately turn his team around.

Others that were not taken in by the excitement of Crosby, chose to predict the future, asking what it would be like to have these two young superstars face off in the playoffs, when the games really mattered.

This year, in the 2009 NHL Playoffs, those people got their wish.

The Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals took very different ways of getting here: One dominated their conference for an entire season, steam rolling opponents with a variety of offensive weapons, while the other—an offensively loaded team as well—suffered what many wondered would happen: A Stanley Cup Finals hangover.

Like so many other teams before them, it took a coaching change to get the Pittsburgh Penguins back over the hump and playing well again, and soon enough the Penguins were back in the playoff hunt, eventually winning their way to the fourth seed and what many saw as a favorable matchup for the Pens with the Philadelphia Flyers.

Proving the critics right, the Pens played a back-and-forth series with the Flyers, eventually winning in six games.

The Caps, despite a fairly straight-forward regular season, which saw them lose the fourth-fewest regulation games in the league (24), went into the playoffs with their own favorable matchup in the New York Rangers.

Prior to the series starting, not many gave the Rangers a chance. If the Blueshirts wanted to win, their top-ranked penalty kill would have to shut down a deadly array of snipers, as well as the big gunner, Mike Green. They’d also need Henrik Lundqvist to be at his show-stopping best, and Sean Avery to be as agitating and irritating as ever, but controlled.

Until jumping out to a 3-1 series lead, it was working: Avery had been a pest (but the inclination was there that it was going downhill after game three), Lundqvist had been great, and the power play had killed off 22 of 25 Washington man-advantages in the first four games.

After that though, the control was lost: John Tortorella was suspended, Sean Avery was benched, and the man no one accounted for, Simeon Varlamov, was stealing a series without even really knowing what he’s doing (Bruce Boudreau has acknowledged that the playoff “hype” is lost in translation).

So after two very different regular seasons, and two more playoff series, the NHL and its fans finally get what they want: Crosby vs. Ovechkin, Malkin vs. Alexander Semin, Jordan Staal vs. Nicklas Backstrom, and Sergei Gonchar and Kris Letang against Mike Green and Tom Poti (OK, maybe that one’s a stretch).

And with the way he’s been playing lately, Simeon Varlamov may not only negate Pittsburgh’s advantage in net with Marc-Andre Fleury, but he’s offset the ace-in-the-hole the Pens have been able to hold over the Caps: A quality young netminder.

This series offers everything you want: Two first overall picks battling for supremacy, a young goalie trying to prove himself going against one who’s trying to prove last year’s success wasn’t a fluke, and this year’s Bruce Boudreau (Dan Bylsma) coaching against last year’s (the actual Bruce Boudreau).

Storylines and scoring—isn’t that exactly what the NHL playoffs are about?

Bryan Thiel is a Senior Writer and an NHL Community Leader for Bleacher Report, and a correspondent for Hockeybarn.com. If you want to get in contact with Bryan, you can do so through his profile, or via email at [e-mail]. You can also check out his previous work in his archives.

This is Bryan's second post-season working in conjunction with the VERSUS Network.