Dunlap: Murray V. Fleury Divide Is Silly
Colin Dunlap is a featured columnist at CBSPittsburgh.com. He can also be heard weekdays from 5:40 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Sports Radio 93-7 "The Fan." You can e-mail him at colin.dunlap@cbsradio.com. Check out his bio here.
This story with the Pittsburgh Penguins' goaltenders just won't go away.
Certainly it makes for stellar sports talk radio; it's the kind of polarizing topic that hosts like me dream about --- seems there are no gray areas, just a faction of people who are firmly planted on one side and a faction on the polar opposite side.
That should make for great stuff in my business and I guess it does, but this is getting exhausting.
It's getting a bit tiresome and exasperating to tell you the truth.
Yep, I will admit it, the Pittsburgh Penguins fans who are fractured into two very distinct sides in this whole Fluery v. Murray thing are making the situation fatiguing.
You know why? Because it doesn't need to be this way.
That's why.
It simply doesn't need to be this way.
Why can't you just want the Penguins to win?
When this all came about --- when backup Matt Murray began to shine toward the end of the regular season and then when Marc-Andre Fleury was cleared to play again after the playoffs started --- this was such a predictable path for Penguins' fans.
Some, hellbent on a loyalty to Fleury, would never waver. They would scream from the highest mountaintops that their man who brought Lord Stanley's glory to the Steel City should play as soon as he's healthy. That Fleury should jump in there and have his spot whenever he was deemed medically capable.
And, more so, even after being infused into the lineup and having a so-so game (as he did in a Game 5 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning) those Fleury loyalists would scream even louder that he needs to keep getting his shot. That he is a crux of this team and his uneven performance in that overtime loss was the product of rust from so much game inactivity.
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It was oh-so predictable and it is what's happening now --- the Fleury people are shrieking for their man to play in Game 6.
And then there are the Murray people.
They never wanted Fleury to get another shot, instead they feel like the young kid who found magnificence at such a young age this season should be the unabashed No. 1 and nothing he could do should supplant him.
Yes, Murray is their guy and even that iffy performance in Game 4 should have coach Mike Sullivan still sticking with him; not just for the remainder of the playoffs but for the long term future of these Penguins.
The Murray people will tell you all about their general manager skills and the trade they have devised to get Fleury out of town this coming off-season so as not to cause any sort of inconvenience or distraction for Murray --- who they feel is indisputably destined for great things.
This is all so reminiscent of the divided crowd in this town when it comes to Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. There seems to be a feeling that if you love Sid, part of you has to dislike Geno for whatever reason --- and vice versa.
To me, that line of thinking has always been so silly, so inane and rife with trying to create a rift when none is really there.
The only thing different from the Sid v. Geno divide is that with the Fleury v. Murray division, just one of those guys gets to play --- thus one faction feels satisfied while the other doesn't even get to see their guy on the ice.
As for this Fleury v. Murray situation, the name of the guy who plays is really pointless as far as I see it. I just think the guy who gives Mike Sullivan's team the best shot at winning should be the man in between those pipes for the next game.
That man, right now for Game 6, is Matt Murray.
That's as deep as it goes for me, though.
And after that game, I'd go ahead and reevaluate things again.
Guess I'm no fun because I actually have a gray area in this regard.