Just missed

Ruslan Fedotenko's second period shot was just enough steam on it to make it into the net after Scott Clemmensen was able to get some of the puck deflected and that summed up the scoring for the night as the Pittsburgh Penguins topped the suddenly punchless New Jersey Devils 1-0.
The Devils travel to the big cesspool for another divisional tilt against the Rangers at 7;30 tonight.

Hell Raisers

1) The Devils had several chances to score in this game as Jamie Langenbrunner missed two wide open nets and Travis Zajac missed one early in the game that could have set the tone for the evening.
Instead,the tone was set in a different manner and that leads us to number two...

2) The Penguins Marc-Andre Fleury played very well,so don't take this as a criticism of the Pittsburgh stopper,but the Devils had numerous rebound opportunities to pounce on them and no one was there.
Teams that crash the net tend to do better than teams that don't and when you look when the Devils were on their solid run,they were doing that.
The last two games they haven't and look at what they have to show for it....

3) This is related to number two in a way.
The Devils are suddenly becoming reliant on outside shots and much like a basketball team that depends on three pointers,there are going to be good night and bad nights.....

4) Doc Emrick hung in there for two and a half periods despite having a bad cold and sore throat.
With his sore throat,Emrick sounded almost exactly like Mike Gorman,who used to be the voice of Big East basketball for years and now does the Boston Celtics local TV games....

5) The possible game tying goal by David Clarkson with four minutes that was reviewed and ruled no goal was a call that I thought was a good one.
The entire puck was not across the line....

Bullpen Notes

Cleaning the in box out with a few things that I didn't have time to write about.

As a Star Trek fan,I was sorry to hear about the death of Majel Barrett Roddenberry last week at the age of 76.
Majel had roles in many of the Star Trek series,but most notably to me as
Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series of the franchise.

The Mansfield Ohio speedway closed its doors as well over the week and as a result was forced to transfer the Craftsman Truck Series race (Kinda the NASCAR version of AA baseball) to Newton Iowa.
Too bad for the NASCAR fans of Ohio as it was the only stop of any kind in Ohio....

Battlin Bob sends us word of a Pirate caravan stop in Cumberland Maryland on Jan 19th.
The Pirates are sending Sean Burnett,Ryan Doumit,Manager John Russell and announcer Tim Neverett and Bob Walk for the Cumberland leg of the goodwill tour.

Photo Credits
Clarkson:AP Photo
Chapel:Unknown