Doing the splits?

How important is tomorrow night’s Game 2? In last season’s playoffs, teams that started a series by winning Games 1 and 2 at home ended up winning the series 7 out of 9 times. The exceptions were Washington, which won the first two games of a second-round series against Pittsburgh but lost, and Detroit, which won the first two games of the Stanley Cup Finals at home but lost the series in seven games.

On the other hand, road teams that earned a split in the first two games won 3 of 4 series (Carolina over New Jersey, Carolina over Boston, Chicago over Vancouver) with the only loss being Anaheim to Detroit, in seven games, after the Ducks split the first two at Joe Louis Arena. After practice today, Terry Murray and Sean O’Donnell talked about the importance of a split and the team’s feeling going into Game 2…

MURRAY: “I always felt it was real important to go back playing at home with a split. It doesn’t mean the end of the series or anything like that. There’s still the two games we have at home, but it makes it much more comfortable if you can go back after splitting on the road.”

O’DONNELL: “That’s a good team over there, and they came out pretty pumped up. I felt like the first period, we had a little bit of that `Let’s feel this out and see what’s going to happen here.’ Jonathan Quick played great. I think there were some people in the media that were questioning whether or not he was ready for the challenge, and I think he more than answered that in the first period and kind of let us get our feet under us and continue on.”