Penguins Crash and Burn Will Sting for Awhile

The Pittsburgh Penguins and the Philadelphia Professional Hockey Club played 11 meaningful games this season. Philadelphia won 8 of those games.

Honestly, I’m not sure much more needs to be said.

There will be a predictable amount of emotional overreaction to the Pens first round playoff demolition and understandably so. The Pens got their rear ends kicked by their most hated rival and their execution and focus in the series was questionable at best (horrendous at worst).

I still believe the Penguins were the deepest and most talented team in the National Hockey League when the playoffs started. This was a team whose radar should have been locked on one goal, the Stanley Cup. A first round exit was completely unacceptable, no matter how unfair the seeds that forced the Pens to play Philly while New Jersey got Florida.

Which is to say that championship teams do not make excuses, they just get it done. I said this in my ill-fated predictions blog; if the Pens were truly a championship team they would overcome an unfortunate first round match-up. To say the least, they did not.

Which brings us right back to losing 8 of 11 meaningful games to Philly and the inevitable conclusion one must come to given that fact. Simply put, Philadelphia was better than the Penguins all year long. We can break down and micro-analyze the series 1,000 different ways. The overriding theme simply does not change.

That should not have been the case. Not with Pronger and Maszaros out of the line-up. Not with so many rookies having to play key minutes for the Orange and Black. Not with a goaltender who struggles to find peace in his sole and harmony with universe as much as he struggles with 30 foot wrist shots. The Penguins with this roster should have been better than Philly.

They were not; not even close.

Some of it may have been psychological a point I made in my last blog. It just seems that between the overriding animosity and Philly’s remarkable penitent for comebacks this season that they got inside the Penguins collective head. Anybody watching game 3 would conclude that the Penguins had completely lost their emotional focus.

Most of it however was physical and/or technical.

The Penguins had no answers for Claude Giroux who was far and away the best player in this series. Much of the credit for that goes to Giroux; the man just had an incredible series. They had no answers for the Philly power play which flat out annihilated a penalty killing unit that was amongst the league’s best for two years straight. Sean Coulturier got so close to Geno Malkin in this series, they could have shared the same pants.

I do not subscribe to the reactionary, fire the coach approach that many fans resort to after a bad loss. At the same time Dan Bylsma will have to answer some serious questions. At the top of the list, why have players like Giroux, Ovechkin, and Mike Cammalleri utilized the Penguins as a launching pad to historic post season performances in the last four years?

That of course is only part of the story.

I’ve never been more inspired by a Penguin team than I was late last season. Undermanned without their two superstars, the Pens battled and fought harder than they ever have, refusing to give up when every reasonable consideration said they should. It was ultimately futile, they simply could not overcome the talent disparity caused by their injuries, but they never quit. And they carried that same work ethic throughout this season, even with the added benefit of Malkin and James Neal at their best.

They continued to battle with passion, fury, and focus, right up to the moment that Crosby returned. And then something clearly and obviously changed. Almost to the day that 87 reentered the line-up, the Pens became a run and gun team trying to overwhelm everyone with superior offensive talent. From there until the final moments of yesterday’s game they never reined it in, never got back to playing the kind of hockey that wins in the post season.

I’m not blaming Crosby for this or even Crosby’s return. I still believe this team was not good enough without him to win the cup. I do believe the entire club let out a collective exhale when Crosby returned. It was almost like they felt they no longer needed that superior work ethic and structure to win hockey games. With a fully loaded roster they were finally just be better than everyone else.

That’s an approach that NEVER succeeds in the NHL post season. Crosby need only ask his landlord for confirmation. The last time a superior talented Penguin team tried to win on skill alone was 1993. The end result was the terrible, awful loss to the Islanders that should never be spoken of. I saw parallels to that team heading in to the post season and wrote about it in the aforementioned predictions blog. There was just something unnerving about how this club played down the stretch, especially against their rivals to the east.

I’m not sure how else you explain what may be the worst defensive and penalty killing performance I have ever seen in the post season. Marc-Andre Fleury will take a lot of blame for this series, and deservedly so but I’m not sure any goaltender could have survived behind this abomination of defensive hockey. Yes Philly is a talented offensive team but I’ll give you pretty good odds they don’t come close to this level of offensive production in their next series.

How else do you explain the complete breakdown of discipline in this series, most notably in game 3? The Penguins faced some ridiculous and irrational criticism as arrogant, cheap shot, whiners down the stretch, criticism that was pure fiction before this series. And then in stunning and embarrassing fashion they lived up to it in game 3.

The entire Penguin club needs to take a hard look at their effort, their focus, and their execution in light of that reality.

And yet with all that we should not forget this: the Penguins lost several games to Philly before Crosby’s return. They lost several games when their work ethic, focus, and defensive play was exactly where it should be. They lost several games when Fleury was on top of his game, Malkin was dominating the league and the club was playing tight defensive hockey.

Simply put, when it’s all said and done, the Philadelphia Professional Hockey club was just better than every incarnation of the Pittsburgh Penguins this year. I will understand if that causes severe intestinal disturbance to Penguin fans. Rest assured it does for me.   It should cause similar or worse distress for the players.  A legitimate Stanley Cup favorite was crushed in the first round by its most bitter rival. More than anything else, that should sting for a long time.