Loss Monday night bad, but 1993 exit still worse

Arena ice late Monday. It seemed flat wrong that Sidney Crosby, after all his greatness in leading the Penguins to consecutive Stanley Cups the previous two seasons, turned over the puck at the Washington blue line, leading to Kuznetsov’s breakaway goal at 5:27 of overtime. You think it was hard watching Crosby congratulate longtime foil Alex Ovechkin in the handshake line? Imagine being in his skates. It had to be brutal.

But neither the Penguins loss in fateful Game 6 nor their failure in the series was shocking. This was no big upset. The Capitals finished with 105 points in the regular season, five more than the Penguins. Their goaltender was better when the games counted most. So was their scoring depth. Did Alex Chiasson really get the first goal Monday night? Alex Chiasson? And has anyone seen Phil Kessel and Derick Brassard? I’m worried about them.

But the Penguins’ loss to the Islanders in Game 7 was one of biggest stunners in NHL history. That 1993 team was the best team of my lifetime, better even than the Penguins teams that won the Cup in 1991 and 1992, although no one wants to hear that because it didn’t win the championship. That team had Scotty Bowman, the greatest coach in the history of the sport. It had the incomparable Mario Lemieux, who, like Crosby for these Penguins, won consecutive Conn Smythe trophies the previous two Cup years. It had Hall of Famers Ron Francis, Larry Murphy and Joe Mullen and Hall of Famer-to-be Jaromir Jagr. It won the Presidents’ Trophy with 119 points and set a stillexisting NHL record by winning 17 consecutive games before tying New Jersey in the final regular-season game.

The Islanders had far less talent and were mediocre at best, finishing the regular season with 87 points, 32 fewer than the Penguins. They should have been especially vulnerable in the series because their star, Pierre Turgeon, missed the first six games with an injury. He had scored 58 goals and 132 points during the season, 45 points more than their next-leading scorer, Steve Thomas. Who did the Islanders have, really? Darius Kasparaitis, who tortured Lemieux during the entire series? Kasparaitis was considered a disgrace to the game back then because of his Tom Wilson-like ways. It wasn’t until he was traded to the Penguins in November 1996 that he became a good, hard hockey player. Pittsburgh loved him. Imagine that.

All these years later, I still can see Volek, who scored all of eight goals in the regular season, screaming down right wing on a two-on-one and taking a pass from Ray Ferraro before burying his wrist shot at 5:16 of overtime. I still can hear the eerie silence in once-throbbing Civic Arena as the puck settled in the net behind Tom Barrasso. It was so quiet I could hear the Islanders whooping it up all the way up in the press box.

That was the second time that night that the crowd’s silence was deafening. The first time happened early in the game when Kevin Stevens landed face-first on the nogive ice after being knocked out in a collision with the Islanders’ Rich Pilon. Lemieux knew it was bad immediately and waved for medical help. Everyone in the building knew it was bad. I’ve been doing this a long time and that was the worst injury I saw until Ryan Shazier at Cincinnati in December.

“The doctors told me that my face looked like a stepped-on potato chip,” Stevens would say after emergency surgery in which those same doctors sliced open his head from ear-toear, pulled down his skin to his neck, picked out the shattered bone fragments, put in five metal plates and closed him back up with 100 stitches.

Who wants to play a little hockey after seeing that injury?

It certainly didn’t look like the Penguins wanted to play after Stevens, who was one of four players on their team with at least 100 points, was taken off the ice on a stretcher. They fell behind, 3-1, midway through the third period after goals by Volek — yes, him — and Benoit Hogue before finally getting interested. Francis scored at 16:13 to make it 3-2 and Rick Tocchet forced overtime with a goal at 19:00.

The old barn Uptown on Centre Avenue rocked. Then, that awful silence. I will never forget it.