DET vs PIT

PITTSBURGH – They all wore white Saturday night at Mellon Arena. But the way it looks now for the Pittsburgh Penguins, their fans will be wearing black late Monday night.

The Penguins lost Game 4, and with it any realistic chance of the Stanley Cup.

Sometime shortly after Marian Hossa gave the Penguins an early lead on the power play, they seemed to lose all their smarts and it ended up costing them dearly. Too much carelessness with the puck in their own zone did in the Pens.

Nowhere was that better exemplified than on the game-winning goal by Jiri Hudler, when Gary Roberts and Jordan Staal failed to get the puck out on an easy opportunity at their own blue-line. A few seconds later, Hudler put a seemingly impossible backhander past Marc-Andre Fleury.

The other thing that lost the game for Pittsburgh – despite Hossa's goal – was the power play. You can't fail to convert on a 5-on-3 for a minute and 26 seconds, but that's what happened when the Penguins failed to take advantage of the glorious opportunity given when Kirk Maltby and Andreas Lilja took separate minors. Henrik Zetterberg was the short-handed star, ragging many key seconds off the clock with a flurry in the Pittsburgh zone and a key steal on Sidney Crosby.

Where's Malkin?

But the Penguins were just too cute with the puck, just not decisive and strong enough with it in close on the PP.

"Tough to explain, there's no doubt we needed to get that goal," Penguins coach Michel Therrien said. "We didn't execute well. We had a chance to tie up the game right there and we didn't do the job."

Evgeni Malkin again showed he's not quite ready for the grand stage. The Penguins centre, so important during the regular season, seems lost. He seems to be hearing footsteps all the time and squeezing the stick when he gets the odd scoring chance.

He's getting zero help from linemate Petr Sykora, however. Sykora, Ryan Malone and Staal have been the other invisible men in the series. But then, the Red Wings have made a lot of excellent offensive players disappear in these playoffs.

Sid stays strong

But Malkin's performance has been the most disappointing to the Penguins.

"He tried, but right now nothing is happening for him," Therrien said. The Red Wings simply played a great defensive game after Hossa's goal, though. The forechecking was tremendous, and Detroit got a great game out of Hudler's line, with Mikael Samuelsson and Valtteri Filppula.

"We wanted to have more poise in our own end, and I think we did," Zetterberg said. "We wanted to play good defence. That makes it easier to create some offence."

The Penguins said they won't give up, but their body language said different after the game. Staal sat slumped at his locker for a long time, staring at the floor. Roberts was glum, and Therrien was back to his old funereal self. Only Crosby seemed to still have hope.

"Tonight could have gone either way. There's no choice now. We've got to win to stay in. They scored two tonight, we scored one. So, I don't think they're running away with it. We'll battle and see what happens," Crosby said.

No go for Holmer

The Red Wings played without Tomas Holmstrom, whose "hamstring" injury proved too sore to go. Holmstrom didn't even take the pre-game warmup, something Wings coach Mike Babcock said would happen earlier in the day. But Babcock's lips were moving, proving once again that anything a coach says about injuries in the playoffs is bound to be untrue in the end.

Captain Europe

Nick Lidstrom, who played his usual phenomenal game, scoring a goal in his game-high 28:23 of action, will be the first European captain in NHL history to win a Cup with one more victory.

"I try not to think about it. I just try to think about winning a Stanley Cup," he said. "You know what to expect, when you've been in situations like this before. You know what it feels like. Having said that, you know you have to show up and play your best, though. We have to approach it like this is not over yet."