Power play, behavior need fixing

Monday, March 21, 2011
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/

Peter Diana/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist makes save on Penguin Matt Cooke in the third period the Consol Energy Center.

Ten games are all that separate the Penguins from the spring awakening of postseason hockey, and yet two chronic issues refuse to lean even a little bit toward resolution.

Two issues that don't even include the still awfully elusive availability of Sidney Crosby, which might or might not have crawled an eighth of an inch toward the positive in the past week. Surely we'll interrupt network programming if the captain is able to actually break a sweat at any point while his concussed gray matter tries to knit itself back together.

But in the meantime, the Penguins got to show the New York Rangers and NBC's national television audience exactly what has been ailing them for most of everyone's available memory, namely their comical power play and their league-worst behavior.

Dan Bylsma's team rang up another 21 penalty minutes Sunday afternoon, surpassing their typical 17.8-minute average of shame time.

The head coach mentioned the avoidance of penalties as a priority a couple of weeks ago, and said he was reasonably satisfied with the fellas' progress right up until Matt Cooke staged yet another Exhibit X of Volume 12 of his incorrigible on-ice villainy.

"We've done a decent job of staying out of the box recently and we were doing a pretty decent job tonight up until we took the major [penalty]," Bylsma said, choosing his words prudently. "Unfortunately we had a clearing attempt where they lifted our stick and on the subsequent play we caught the guy and left the referee with no choice but to call a four-minute penalty on [Matt] Niskanen."

Cooke went out of his way to elbow New York's Ryan McDonagh in the head at 4:36 of the third period of what was still a 1-1 hockey game, collapsing the Rangers defenseman to the ice and eliciting a five-minute major and a game misconduct penalty.

Cooke should be suspended and certainly should expect nothing less if for no other reason than, as Bylsma pointed out, you can't have an organization that is so up front about wanting to eliminate all head hits and not expect the league to rub your nose in it when your own attack dog mauls again.

He didn't say it in those words, of course, but he could not have been clearer.

When Cooke departed, Chris Kunitz instantly inverted the karma by scoring short-handed at 6:26 for a 2-1 Penguins lead, the main feature of which would be brevity.

When Niskanen high-sticked Ryan Callahan, whose blood promptly plopped onto the pond, the Penguins found themselves skating three-against-five for nearly two minutes.

Marian Gaborik made them pay, tying it at 9:29, and then the wounded Callahan, the red rut on the bridge of his nose temporarily sealed, flipped a bad angle shot over Marc-Andre Fleury's near shoulder to set up New York's third comeback victory in three visits to the new building this season.

"Yeah I saw it, an opening," Callahan said. "He was down a little bit and I thought I could get it through. My nose was hurting but it feels better right away when you get one like that."

It was a day of semi-miraculous recoveries for the Rangers, now winners in six of their past seven and one of the Eastern Conference horses that seem to be gaining strength down the stretch. Goalie Henrik Lundqvist didn't even know if he would play Sunday with a neck still hurting from being knocked to the ice Friday night in Montreal.

"I couldn't tell them one way or another when I woke up," Lundqvist said. "I didn't know how I'd feel with a mask on or anything, but I wanted to play. It's really fun to play right now."

That's what happens when you're back-stopping a team that scored five times in the first period Friday night, six times in each of its previous two games, and five times again Sunday by the time Brian Dubinsky finished it with an empty-netter 39.2 seconds from the final horn.

"It was tough to see some pucks on the blocker side," said Lundqvist, who still managed to withstand two Penguins 3-on-2 breaks in a brilliant second period, "but we've been playing some really solid defense all year."

The Rangers killed three Penguins power plays, but that is simply no longer a barometer of any NHL defense, or any feather in the helmet of your standard penalty-killing unit.

The Penguins are 2-for-the-last-50 on the power play.

Two for 50.

If the playoffs started today, even if these Penguins suddenly became a highly disciplined hockey club led by Sidney Crosby, they wouldn't want to head into that first series with the power play converting at a rate of 4 percent.

Note to the uninitiated: No, you cannot just decline the penalty.

Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com

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