-As expected, Pittsburgh knocked out the New York Islanders and will be Ottawa’s second round opponent. Oddly enough, neither journalists nor bloggers have dived into the match-up much yet.
–Jason Spezza practiced with the team today, although the organisation remains cagey about his return. There’s no question the Penguins will plan for him to be in the lineup however, so other than teasing fans I’m not sure what the point of the ambiguity is.
–Scott had the scoring chances of game five 15/9.
–Travis Yost has a point of emphasis he thinks has largely been missed:
It’s interesting to me that MacLean more or less bestowed all of the credit for the team’s success on the front office, which is a point that keeps getting buried under a lot of the Jack Adams discussion. This is a point I’ve been trying to hammer home for the past couple of months, none of it a slight to what the head coach has really accomplished. MacLean might have been able to mask some deficiencies, but without good players, Ottawa’s not in the second-round of the playoffs.
I don’t think anyone could argue differently–without good players in the pipeline it wouldn’t matter how great a coach MacLean is.
-Travis also looks at Jean-Gabriel Pageau‘s impact via the same link–he had a great series.
–Jason Chen offers Hockey’s Future update of the Sens top-20 prospects. This list is troubled by HF’s rigid policy of requiring a certain number of NHL games before a player is considered to be no longer a prospect:
1. Mika Zibanejad
2. Jakob Silfverberg
3. Robin Lehner
4. Cory Conacher
5. Stefan Noesen
6. Chris Driedger
7. Patrick Wiercioch
8. Cody Ceci
9. Matt Puempel
10. Mark Stone
11. Shane Prince
12. Eric Gryba
13. Jean-Gabriel Pageau
14. Mark Borowiecki
15. Andre Petersson
16. Stephane Da Costa
17. Mike Hoffman
18. Fredrik Claesson
19. Derek Grant
20. Robbie Baillargeon
There’s not much reasoning that I can see for how Chen has arranged the list–why did Mark Stone drop from #6 to #10? Why did Mike Hoffman fall? I have no idea. Lists like these have inherent problems, but I wish there was more investment into explaining the changes and rankings.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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eyeonthesens 
Oddly enough timing is the reason for little analysis of the Sens-Pens series. Bloggers haven’t had a large amount of time (Game did not end until late Saturday evening) and the professional writers (humorously noted by Bruce Garrioch on team 1200) have largely taken the weekend off given it will be the only Friday/Saturday they get off for the next month.
Absolutely correct that the series was only set last night, but I think most of us (all?) realised that was going to be the match-up. I haven’t written anything either, but the trend all season is for fewer blogs on the weekend, which I find interesting. As for the journalists…it’s no surprise at all.
[…] Yost looks more at Jean-Gabriel Pageau‘s surprising contribution (again) which served as a reminder that I’ve never taken a full look at his time in Binghamton […]