By Tim Benz
April 23, 2018
Jake Guentzel #59 of the Pittsburgh Penguins celebrates a first period goal by Sidney Crosby #87 against Michal Neuvirth #30 of the Philadelphia Flyers in Game Six of the Eastern Conference First Round during the 2018 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at the Wells Fargo Center on April 22, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Penguins defeated the Flyers 8-5 to win the series 4-2. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
When the NFL schedule was released last week, you saw a couple of “those games” for the Steelers.
The road games where you just roll your eyes and say, “Ugh! They never win there.”
At Oakland, where they have lost three in a row to awful Raiders teams. In Denver, where they have lost seven times in nine tries.
At least a game in New England isn't on tap. They still haven't beaten Tom Brady there, right?
Imagine feeling that multiple times per season. Every season. For 15 seasons in a row.
That was life as a Penguins fan from February 1974 until February 1989 anytime the skating birds played at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.
Forty-two trips without a win. Thirty-nine losses. Three ties.
To relate that on a personal level, I was in driver's education classes before I knew it was possible for the Penguins to win in Philadelphia.
Along the way, the Penguins were outscored 223-95. Some individual games saw scores of 13-4, 11-4, and 11-0 .
So how beautifully ironic is it that the 2017-18 Penguins, who had been so bad on the road during the regular season, went 5-0 in Philly, including all three postseason games?
Yes, the building is different. It's now the Wells Fargo Center. But the ghosts of the Spectrum still float over that new structure.
In 2017-18, though, it was Sidney Crosby and Co. doing most of the haunting.
The Penguins won both regular-season games by a combined score of 10-3. In three postseason games, it was 18-6.
That, of course, didn't go over well with the “Philly Phaithful” as they showered the ice with beer cans and other debris in the waning moments Sunday.
It left winger Jake Guentzel with one thought: “Don't get hit.”
Come to think of it, bonking Guentzel with a beer can might have been the only way to slow him. He scored four goals in Game 6 to help the Penguins win 8-5 in the series clincher.
“Whenever you can score a couple of goals in a game, it's special,” Guentzel said. “But to do it on the road and silence the crowd, it definitely feels good.”
The Penguins were 17-20-4 on the road this year. No playoff team had fewer road wins.
So given that two of those wins were in Philadelphia, plus the 3-for-3 effort in this series, maybe the common denominator was the — dare I say it — “comfort” of playing in Philadelphia, rather than Mike Sullivan's team finding a rudder on the road.
Penguins fans probably should hope it's the latter, though. Because if Washington wins the other Metro Division playoff series against Columbus, home-ice advantage in the next round won't be in Pittsburgh.
Now that the postseason is here, the hope is that road play is improving. This appears to be the case with other aspects of the team's performance.
The penalty kill got better. It was successful 19 of 21 times in this series after being a mediocre 80 percent this season.
Although Sunday and Game 2 won't go on Matt Murray's highlight reel, he gave up just one goal in the other three wins combined, allaying some concern his playoff magic wouldn't return after a less-than-stellar regular season statistically.
Then there's Guentzel, who struggled mightily to score during the last two months of the season . But he already has six goals and 13 points in the playoffs after his five-point effort Sunday.
“That was something special,” Murray said. “I've never seen anything like it, to be honest. That's as hot as you can get.”
There still is a long way to go before we know if the Penguins will win a third consecutive Stanley Cup.
If that happens, they will have made team history.
But with so much coalescing in a positive manner this season in Philadelphia, this first playoff step already has gone a long way toward rewriting a nasty portion of it.
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at tbenz@tribweb.com or via Twitter @TimBenzPGH.
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