By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
Maybe it was that killer winter and maybe it was more the long, brutal retreat from Milledgeville, Ga., but you'd have a hard time remembering a warmer emotional welcome for the start of the NHL playoffs in this town.
Blessedly, Lord Stanley's loyal defenders will be in the ancient Uptown rink tonight to skate with the highly combustible Ottawa Senators, two teams that have proved to be stunningly dismissive of each other in previous postseasons. The Ottawans chased Sidney Crosby's first playoff team from the tournament in five games three years ago, and the Penguins turned around and skunked the Senators in four the very next spring.
Matt Freed/Post-Gazette
Penguins goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury.
"It's the best time of the year," said Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury after the club's last pre-playoff practice. "Everyone plays with their emotions up. It's a different kind of hockey. Very intense."
Fleury won't admit it, of course, but this first-round matchup might be most intense inside his head, because the concentration and reactions required of the Penguins' goaltender have increased dramatically of late.
In the event you haven't noticed, there's a not-too-subtle difference between these 2009-10 Penguins and the edition that brought home the organ-I-zation's third Stanley Cup championship in June. That team, at least the one that suddenly materialized Feb. 15 for new coach Dan Bylsma, played so relentlessly and successfully in the offensive zone in those last 25 games that it allowed only 2.4 goals per game. This year, with Bylsma's system in place for an entire winter, goals against averaged 2.87.
If there's a fine line in this business, as is oft-rumored, that nearly half-goal per game can easily put you on the wrong side of it.
"Our goal is to possess the puck and play in the offensive zone as much as possible," said defenseman Mark Eaton, "but, when it comes to playing 5-on-5 in our defensive coverages, we're comfortable and confident in our ability to do that."
That's pretty much what everybody said Tuesday, but I wonder if they are.
No one has to be reminded that these playoffs could look a lot different without Rob Scuderi and Hal Gill among those deployed fronting Fleury. I wasn't much of a Gill fan, but he was hard to move back there and harder to fool, and Scuderi had a metronomic ability for making the right play. After Eaton and Brooks Orpik and Sergei Gonchar, whom do you trust, among Penguins defensemen, to weather a sustained assault from a Senators team that has shown itself fully capable of launching one, particular against the Penguins?
But the potential predicament isn't so much one of personnel in this instance as the impact of Bylsma's system on the personnel. For one thing, the way the Penguins like to play, in which defense is primarily a function of tiring the opposing offense by making it run around defending its own net, has been copied liberally throughout the NHL this year. The number of teams desperate to get up ice has at times exposed the Penguins' inconsistent back-checking and, it says here, could again. For another, even when the system works, it tends to subtract from the experience the defenders accumulate in the discipline known as, um, defending.
"Well, that's the key to hockey," Bylsma smiled. "I played with great defensemen who were minus players because they were playing too much defense. When you play defense too often, you're not going to be as effective as you can be with the puck, which is why we'll continue to concentrate on the things we want to do, and that includes back-checking, puck retrieval and getting the puck up ice."
More than anyone, this would figure to matter to Fleury, who carries most of the burden for the Penguins' postseason success right there in his own happy-go-lucky psyche, never mind that the whole notion is at best an oversimplification. Having played in Michel Therrien's defense-first system ("responsibility" was the former coach's favored theme) and a little more as a spectator in Bylsma's modified fire-wagon tempo, Fleury wasn't biting on which he prefers.
"Both styles have their ups and downs," he said, enjoying the dodge. "It's always nice to see guys scoring three and four and five goals, then, if I let one in, it's not so bad. But it's not like we don't know what to do in our own end. We have a system in place."
Ottawa's got one, too, and it involves sending Daniel Alfredsson and Jason Spezza, and Mike Fisher, and Milan Michalek through the neutral zone at great speed, then clogging the same area with still another modified trap whenever the puck has been surrendered.
"There are 30 teams in the NHL and there might be three or four different kinds of neutral-zone forechecks," Eaton said. "Not too much changes."
When you start the playoffs defending Lord Stanley's Cup, you have to hope that's right.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.
Penguins Plus, a blog by Dave Molinari and Shelly Anderson, is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
No comments:
Post a Comment