By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
Pawel Dwulit/The Canadian Press
Penguins fans in Ottawa cheer after a Pittsburgh goal in the second period against the Ottawa Senators in Stanley Cup playoff action Sunday night.
OTTAWA -- You wouldn't know it this morning, but the Senators were still cultivating all the promising elements of momentum as these Eastern Conference quarterfinals shifted north of the border, to wit:
They had earned a split at Mellon Arena; they had delivered the most vicious hit of the series to date with Andy Sutton's evident concusser to the noggin of Jordan Leopold; they were playing on the stage where they went 26-11-4 this season; and, they were going play Game 3 on the 44th birthday of the club's massage therapist, Shawn Markwick.
Really, how were the Penguins supposed to deal with all of that?
When the first-round playoff opponent is coming at you with everything including an amped massage therapist, you had better watch your flippers.
Fortunately for the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Senators were coming with something else as well Sunday night, specifically a raft of stupidity that spun into frustration that spun into more stupidity. Even when Penguins forward Matt Cooke tried to match them stupid-for-stupid in the second period, the Senators went from dumb to dumber.
Maybe Ottawa felt there was no deterrent to taking the standard stupid penalty because the Penguins were shooting less frequently on the power play than the Senators were short-handed, and when all the Penguins had to show after one period was a go-ahead goal by Alexei Ponikarovsky, his first in a month, it was easy enough for Mike Fisher to flick one past Marc-Andre Fleury early in the second to put the home fellas on perfectly even terms.
Games were 1-1, goals were 7-7, the postseason see-saw was perfectly parallel to the flat ice.
Then the brain cramping started.
Evgeni Malkin seemed to spark it despite the absence of culpability. Geno merely collected the puck in his end, swept threateningly up ice, and carried the disc into the high slot only to encounter the hulking Sutton. But a sweet give-and-go with Max Talbot resulted in a Malkin goal and a 2-1 lead.
"I think that goal was the big momentum goal," Talbot said with the benefit of hindsight. "After that we just kept it up and kept it up. We took control. We were patient. We were tough. It was like we started playing a lot smarter."
Well, it looked smarter, but especially when you looked at Ottawa first.
The initial response to Malkin's marker came from Chris Neil, who tried to ram Malkin through the half boards, snapping Geno's head back and drawing the richly deserved charging minor. Simultaneously, Jarkko Ruutu was earning a 10-minute misconduct he sincerely wanted to discuss with Malkin and Kris Letang before being led away. Even after Cooke banged Ottawa's Peter Regin dangerously into the end boards for a classical boarding penalty, Senators defenseman Erik Karlsson nullified his team's advantage by slashing Jordan Staal 27 seconds later.
"That's our game; we wanted to frustrate them," Staal said. "We wanted to play in their face hard all night."
That frustration reached the tipping point when Cooke emerged from the bin, because 230-pound defenseman Matt Carker (he of the team-leading 190 penalty minutes) chased him into the corner with apparent malice aforethought, inadvertently leaving the center of the offensive zone free for Sidney Crosby to beat Sutton across the slot from the opposite corner and bury the shot that made it 3-1.
"Both teams were trying to play disciplined," said Crosby, who has 20 points in 12 career playoff games against Ottawa. "But it doesn't always stay that way."
Even before Ottawa's subsequent roughing and kneeing and general poor comportment ended, Chris Kunitz had found Billy Guerin floating behind the Ottawa defense, and Guerin turned Brian Elliott inside out before whipping one in to make it 4-1.
To that point, total goals from the point in this series where Sutton dropped Leopold to the ice face-first read, Penguins 5, Ottawa 1.
"After [the Malkin goal], I thought we really had a good response to their physicality," said Penguins coach Dan Bylsma, 18-9 behind the bench in the postseason. "They were really coming after us and I think you have to give our defensemen a lot of credit. They stuck in there. They took some hits. And they made plays.
"It takes a lot of courage to go back there and make a play on the puck the way they were coming. Kris Letang and Sergei Gonchar really did that for us late, and Jay McKee, Mark Eaton, they all did a great job."
Crosby cautioned late last night that there's a lot of hockey still to played in this series, but if the Senators are just going to run around in violent spasms, there won't be as much as there ought to be. When they keep their heads, they can hang with these champions -- Crosby didn't get a shot until well into the second period -- but they've got to quit dumbing it down.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.
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