Penguins solve some problems, but find another way to lose
Penguins are not problem solvers by nature, at least according to the zero zoologists consulted for this column, and the Pittsburgh sub-species is actually more of a problem magnet.
All kinds of available maladies, malfunctions, and misfortunes routinely attach themselves to this NHL franchise, including that it has now lost six consecutive overtime games at home in the postseason, so, when the hockey club began Game 4 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals with a blatant burst of problemsolving, suspicion ran high that something was afoot.
Having allowed their opponents to score first in six consecutive playoff games (the longest they’d sustained that particular bad idea in the history of the franchise), they suddenly fixed it.
Having failed to score at all in the first periods of any of the first three games of this series, they suddenly fixed that as well.
Having trailed after the first 20 minutes at every opportunity,
they suddenly fixed that. too.
And far more urgently than perhaps any of that, having generally stunk at home in the playoffs for as long as their new building had stood, they even appeared to have gone swiftly about the business of changing that.
“It was a focus for us,” defenseman Ben Lovejoy said, “but now it doesn’t matter. We’re down, 3-1.”
The truth hurts, and that was the true result of a brief and manic overtime in which the victorious Rangers got the very kind of goal — the players call them greasy goals — the Penguins never seem to get, or certainly not at any critical crossroads in their down-spiraling playoff history.
New York rookie Kevin Hayes got that winner, but the play started with the irrepressible Martin St. Louis. Flying in on right wing and looking anything but a player whose odometer has turned over several times, the 39-year-old calmly brought the puck from behind the cage to the left of Marc-Andre Fleury, whipped it across the goal mouth and the skate of Paul Martin, who could only watch in horror as New York’s Carl Hagelin swept it onto Hayes’ blade just as Fleury sprawled toward it.
Hayes shoved it behind Fleury’s head at 3:14 of the extra period.
The 2-1 final pushed the Penguins to the edge of the playoff cliff, but sometimes you have to wonder who’s pushing whom, because a 2-1 final also represented the third time in four games of this series that the Penguins have scored but once in 60 minutes or more, and the sixth time in their past 10 games going back to April 1 that they’ve scored exactly one.
Give them this night, their nightly goal. And yet somehow after 60 sweaty minutes, the were stunned to find they’d solved just about every problem in sight, every last problem except the one that is going to prove fatal in this series — they just aren’t shooting the puck enough. They refuse to shoot the puck enough.
Overpassing is what coach Mike Johnston calls it.
He says it repeatedly and he says it, somehow, without a single expletive.
Two minutes into a scoreless third period that would force the overtime that would ensure a fourth consecutive one-goal game in this series, Penguins Brandon Sutter and Nick Spaling found themselves streaking toward the New York goal when the puck came free to Sutter in the right circle, where 20 feet of clean ice lay between him and Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist. Did Sutter snap it? No. Did he blast it? No. He passed it, or, excuse me, he overpassed it.
He tried to find Spaling near the blue paint, where the puck clattered around in a forest of sticks and got directed harmlessly back toward center ice.
That kind of thing has happened in this series, I would say, oh, 498 times.
“Yeah, I’d have to look at it,” said an exasperated Johnston, unable to steer from the topic. “We had six shots with nine minutes left in the third period (they finished with eight) and for the remainder of that period I thought we could have had a few more shots.”
Even given an extra three minutes, the Penguins had only 23 shots, one more than in Game 2, one less than in Game 3. They had gone back-toback games with fewer than 25 shots only four times in the season’s past 41 games, and now they’ve turned a futility hat trick with slapstick playoff timing.
“How can we get a few more chances and still play the way we have defensively, that has to be our approach,” said Johnston. “I know it hasn’t swung our way 2-1 yet, but it will.” Of course. Or it won’t. Given the course of recent history, I’ll take won’t.