Osgood is a fine goalie. He generally makes almost all of the saves he should make and some of the ones that he isn’t “supposed” to make.

Watching the playoffs, it’s pretty clear that whichever team comes out of the West has about a 95% chance of winning the Stanley Cup. Obviously, Philly isn’t that good of a team and Pittsburgh can’t move the puck well out of their zone and has a tendency to turn the puck over at their offensive blue line. Against a team like the Wings, that will lead to a lot of goals against.

As a Wings fan, I was really surprised by how they dominated Game 1. I thought Game 2 was a lot more interesting of a game (at least what I saw of it) and I think the Stars will look much better at home for a couple of reasons.

First, they’ll have the last change, which means that they’ll be much more able to get the matchups they want. Chelios doesn’t make as many stupid mistakes as he did a few years ago, but when the opposing forwards start cycling, he’s pretty ineffective.

Second, just because of the heat/humidity, the ice in Dallas almost certainly won’t be nearly as good as in Detroit. For a puck possession team like the Wings, having a choppy ice surface makes it really tough to break out of the zone the way they like to do. For example, there’s no way that the Wings would have scored the fourth goal in Game 1 if the ice was a little slushy, since the pass from Rafalski to Samuelsson would have been really tough to complete as cleanly as it did.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Dallas took both games at home. From the Wings perspective, this isn’t like last round when you knew that Colorado wouldn’t win four games unless it was a best-of-23. The Stars aren’t as badly injured as the Avalanche and their players are better anyways.