Who saw this coming?
All that talk about a monumental sweep was silenced in powerful fashion as the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the brakes off the Philadelphia Flyers Wednesday night, scoring 10 goals in a Game Four rout on the road.
The Penguins now return home in hopes of building on that momentum Friday night. The bad news is Philadelphia has won seven of eight at the Consol Energy Center.
Pittsburgh is feeling great coming back home, but knows there’s still work to be done.
“The way we looked at it, it didn’t matter if it was 2-1 or 10-3,” defenseman Brooks Orpik told the Associated Press. “It’s still only one win. You don’t get any extra points for beating them by seven goals. We’ve dug ourselves a big hole and we just have to chip away at it, little by little here.”
The Flyers got it all backwards Wednesday, scoring the first goal of the game for the first time in the whole series. But it was bloodshed afterwards. After the score got to 3-2, Pittsburgh netted eight unanswered goals to end any question of its resolve. The Penguins literally punched their way out of Game Three, but used their sticks for the knockout in Game Four.
“I think it’s all kind of crossed our mind and probably a lot of other people’s too,” Sidney Crosby said. “You see that happen maybe once and you kind of think `Oh, that’s a weird game’ and then in four games it’s surprising but we’ve got to find ways to adjust and ways to win.”
Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal accounted for six of the team’s goals. Crosby has eight points in the series and Staal’s hat trick was a team first.
It was such a mind-boggling turnaround that Bovada’s NHL Betting Lines posted a total of seven for tonight. Seven. Not such a surprise considering the 45 goals so far in the series is an NHL record through four games.
“We’re going to find out what kind of team we are, how we are built,” 
Philadelphia forward Jaromir Jagr said. “If we are the team like we think we are, we’re going to have to respond the next game.”
The Flyers are NHL’s best road team, and may get James Van Riemsdyk back from a foot injury. Van Riemsdyk has been out since early March.
Bovada is favoring the Penguins by 1 1/2, with a -190 moneyline