You know the old adage about bounces in sports balancing themselves out over the course of time?  That surely proved to be the case for the New York Rangers in the series deciding game six loss to the Buffalo Sabres.  You remember, of course, the fortuitous hops, skips, and jumps the puck was taking during the Rangers sweep of Atlanta, particularly on the Nylander goal in game one, the Avery and Shanahan goals in game two, and the Cullen winning goal in the game four finale.  I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Henrik Lundqvist in the clincher against Buffalo when the tables turned and no fewer than three of the five Sabres goals were scored as a result of pucks taking pronounced detours into the New York net.  The first goal went off a defender’s skate and did about a 45-degree turn as it sailed up above Lundqvist’s left shoulder; the second Buffalo tally deflected off a shin pad on a shot from the slot, and the game winning fifth goal was a tip by Jochen Hecht that is still being analyzed at Georgia Tech to determine if it indeed did break all known laws of physics.  It seems the gods of hockey bounces must have thought the Rangers good-bounce-to-bad-bounce-ledger had to be balanced, in a hurry.
 

Bad bounces aside, though, that game six at Madison Square Garden was one for the playoff ages, especially the third period, which was absolutely breathtaking.  The Rangers made it eminently clear they were not going to go quietly into the Manhattan afternoon, and they pretty much dictated the tempo and intensity of the final 20 minutes.  If not for Ryan Miller’s rather curious decision to move way over to his right to get a better view of Michael Roszival’s shot from the top of the slot in the waning seconds, we may very well have seen a game seven in that series.  By making his rather drastic move, Miller was in great position to stop the tip of Roszival’s blast by Jaromir Jagr.  It was a dramatic ending to a fabulous game of hockey that, to me anyway, embodied everything this sport is about and is trying to sell.

One other thing in regards to that series:  is there anyone in hockey you’d rather see with a puck on his stick when your team is in dire need of a game changing or clinching goal than Chris Drury?  That guy is absolute money, and he has been since his Trumbull, CT, Little League team won the world championship in 1989.  (Drury, of course, pitched a five-hitter to win that game, driving in two runs along the way and earning the MVP award for the entire series.)  The goal he scored to tie game five against the Rangers, with 7.7 seconds left in regulation was vintage Drury.  His blast went through the legs of teammate Thomas Vanek on its way by Lundqvist into the short side of the Rangers cage.  In my opinion, only a guy with Drury’s composure and flair for the dramatic gets that shot away with that kind of accuracy under that kind of pressure.  You think he’s going to enjoy the UFA marketplace?