With their 2-1 victory over the Red Wings in Game 6 on Tuesday night, the young Penguins are now one win away from hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup and pulling off the best NHL upset of the decade.

One problem: They can’t score at Joe Louis Arena and that’s exactly where the decisive Game 7 will be played on Thursday night. In three games at the Joe this postseason, Pittsburgh’s managed to score just two goals and were shut out 5-0 in Game 5.

It’s time for Dan Bylsma to get a little creative with his front line. Why not put Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin (the Pens’ top two scoring threats) together on the same line to increase scoring chances? Some Pittsburgh fans have been clamoring for this to happen since the Pens lost the Cup last year, so why not try it now?

Some might think that it would be unwise to change things up now with only one game left to be played, but now is actually the best time to take a risk like this because Pittsburgh needs to try and overwhelm Detroit they best it can. The Wings play with so much confidence at the Joe, so Byslma needs something to rattle their cage.

Of course, there are two main problems with the idea of putting both Crosby and Malkin together. One is that Pittsburgh has created scoring opportunities in every game this series, but just haven’t executed. Secondly, and this is a biggie, if the Pens put Crosby and Malkin together on the same line then that puts Maxime Talbot, Chris Kunitz, Ruslan Fedotenko together on the third line, which needless to say is a major disadvantage for Pittsburgh.

It’ll be interesting to see what strategies Byslma comes up with (if any) for Game 7. This one is for all the marbles and it’d be a shame if the Pens left scoring opportunities on the ice when there’s only one game left.

Thanks to a 2-1 victory in overtime against the Blackhawks on Wednesday night, the Red Wings have set up a rematch with the Penguins in the Stanley Cup Finals.

Detroit won the Western Conference finals 4-1. The Red Wings and Penguins, coming off a four-game sweep over Carolina in the East, will open the championship series Saturday night in Detroit.

The series will start nearly a week ahead of schedule because NBC and the NHL didn’t want a long layoff to stunt the excitement about the matchup.

I think plenty of casual hockey fans wanted to see some new blood in the Finals, but it’s hard to beat a matchup between Sidney Crosby and the red hot Penguins vs. the defending champs. This will also be the first rematch of the Stanley Cup finals since the Islanders and Oilers battled each other in back to back years in 1983 and 1984.

The 21-year old Crosby draws a lot of comparisons to the “Great One” Wayne Gretzky and legend Mario Lemieux, but even he’ll admit that until he wins a cup, people will always question the legitimacy of those comparisons. A Cup victory over the powerful Wings would go a long way in helping Sid Kid gain even more backers.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Wings get Nicklas Lindstrom and Pavel Datsyuk back on Saturday. Both players were scratched from Wednesday night’s game after expecting to play. Hopefully Detroit will be at full strength come Saturday, because this series should be a battle.