Pens’ high-wire act matches Sens’ magic, as illusions go
The Ottawa Senators are underdogs, right? The Ottawa Senators are the littlest Canadian franchise, the one that doesn’t spend to the cap, the one that won five of their last 15 down the stretch, that was outscored during the season, et cetera, and so forth. The sixth-seeded Senators have already won six times in overtime, and won the Rangers series despite leading for 13 minutes of the first five games, and the comparisons to the miracle Habs of 1993 are already floating around in the glittering, pixie-dust air.
But let’s take a second to appreciate the miracles that are being attempted elsewhere, too. The Pittsburgh Penguins are the defending champs, and took down top-seeded Washington, and are trying to become the most lopsided team to win a Stanley Cup since Sidney Crosby was 4 years old.
“They have such high-end players,” said Senators coach Guy Boucher, after Ottawa took Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final 2-1 on Saturday. “You name it, they have it.”
Well, obviously. Evgeni Malkin leads all players in playoff scoring with 19 points; Jake Guentzel and Sidney Crosby are tied for fourth with 14; Phil Kessel is tied for sixth with Ottawa’s leading scorer, Erik Karlsson, at 13. In Game 1, those four produced Pittsburgh’s lone goal, and one out of every three of Pittsburgh’s 56 shot attempts.
For the playoffs, in 13 games — one of which Crosby missed with a concussion — the big four had 24 goals, to 18 for the rest of the Penguins; they had combined for 60 points, to 55 for the rest of the Penguins.
Basically, the Penguins are as topheavy as a hippo with giraffe legs. Or an ornate wooden chair built on kebab sticks. Or something. Look, these Penguins are as top-heavy as any team in 25 years. It’s kind of crazy.
“Obviously, when you’ve got stars like Crosby and Malkin and Kessel, I mean, those guys are not just good at speeding up the game. They can slow it down, they can accelerate,” said Boucher. “They can get something out of nothing, and that’s why they’re stars.”
There are lots of teams with stars, but this is an exceptionally imbalanced team right now. You could call Crosby, Malkin, Kessel and special guest Guentzel the four horsemen, except in this case they’re the horses. Last year’s Penguins were far more balanced, both in scoring and in possession; this one is a historic outlier. The last team whose top four scorers had more goals and points than everybody else combined on a Stanley Cup-winning team was . . . the 1992 Pittsburgh Penguins, when Mario Lemieux, Kevin Stevens, Ron Francis and a 20-year-old Jaromir Jagr accounted for 48 of Pittsburgh’s 83 playoff goals, and produced 113 combined points to 104 for everyone else. (These are not misprints. Back then, Lemieux had 34 points in 15 playoff games. He missed six of ’em with a broken wrist. That was some fun, back in the dying days of hockey that was stuffed full of goals.)
The 1991 Penguins did it, too, with Lemieux plus Mark Recchi, Stevens and Larry Murphy on a team that also included Francis, Paul Coffey and a 19-year-old Jagr. Also, the ’88 Oilers, in Wayne Gretzky’s last year in Edmonton, plus Mark Messier, Jari Kurri and Esa Tikkanen.
Those sound like flattering comparisons, but these Penguins aren’t those powerhouses, and they aren’t close. They have beaten the teams with the best- and third-best records in the league with this ragged defence corps that is dressing one of its top five defencemen from last year’s playoffs, and that one is a one-legged Brian Dumoulin. The Penguins are 16th among 16 playoff teams, controlling 42 per cent of all shot attempts at five-on-five. That is “tanking to draft the next Sidney Crosby” bad.
Which makes those high-end Penguins even more important. This is like trying to win the Stanley Cup with the 2014 Edmonton Oilers’ possession numbers bolted onto some stars. Pittsburgh was outshot 31-13 at five-on-five in Game 1, and Kessel still hit a crossbar late in the third period with one of his near-peerless wrist shots. Crosby wasn’t great; Malkin often skated into traffic; the Penguins were still that close. This Pittsburgh team is deeply vulnerable, and if it’s going to win the big dogs have to carry the weight.
“I think we’ve got to simplify the game a little bit,” said Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan. “I just think we have to recognize where the opportunities are on the rink to create, and there’s going to be some situations where we can’t. And when we can’t, we’ve got to hang on to the puck. We’ve got to exercise some patience. We’ve got to force them to have to expend energy defending us. And maybe it might be one of those cases where we have to wait for our next shift.
“The important thing is, I don’t think we need to force things that aren’t there.”
Ottawa is trying to win a Stanley Cup with a team nobody believed in, with the magic of overtime goals and comeback wins, and given the state of these playoffs, who knows? They could do it. And what Pittsburgh is trying might be stranger and harder, and maybe by far.