http://torontosun.com/sports/hockey/nhl/simmons-penguins-three-peat-not-out-of-the-question
April 8, 2018
Sidney Crosby isn’t just playing for himself and his team this Stanley Cup season. He’s playing for history.
The kind of history Wayne Gretzky wanted to make but couldn’t. The kind of history Mario Lemieux talked about but never attained. The kind of hockey history that no team has experienced in the past 35 years.
They don’t say three-peat out loud very much around the Penguins these days but it’s obvious, the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions can win again this year. The possibility of three in a row. A feat that no team since the dynastic New York Islanders won four in a row ending in 1983 has been able to match.
“Three-peat, we hear it, we don’t talk about it,” Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford said. “But it’s obviously there. Really, there’s nothing to talk about at this point. We have a team good enough to win again. It’s never easy to win. It’s probably harder to repeat. We’re capable of doing it.”
The great Gretzky teams in Edmonton, maybe the most explosive in history with Mark Messier and Jari Kurri and Grant Fuhr, won five Stanley Cups, although Gretzky wasn’t around for the fifth championship. Yet they didn’t win three in a row.
They won two and then lost. Won two more and then lost. And then the final championship in 1990.
How different a time was it for hockey? From 1984 to 1990, for seven straight seasons, a Canadian team won the Cup. And when Lemieux’s Penguins won back-to-back, ending in 1992, they missed out in 1993 and the Montreal Canadiens went on and won the title.
The last Canadian team to win the Cup.
There have been some terrific championship runs in recent decades. Chicago won three Cups in five years, but never two in a row. Los Angeles won twice, again not back to back. Scotty Bowman’s Detroit Red Wings won three champions in six years.
Pittsburgh is the fourth team since the Islanders to win two Cups in a row. The third one seems to be the challenge at a time when 11 different teams have won in the past 17 seasons.
Yet it’s entirely possible the Penguins can become that record-setting team this spring. They have many of the great parts that have contributed to the previous two championships. Mike Sullivan is a good a coach as there is in hockey today. The previous three-peat — actually, four-peat — winners were coached by Al Arbour and Bowman. Nice company for Sullivan to have his name alongside.
It’s the same with Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, the best 1-2 punch at centre since Gretzky and Messier and Lemieux and Ron Francis and probably more accomplished than Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg in Colorado or Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov in Detroit. They have already been Penguins for three Stanley Cups. The first one came in 2009. The last two being the most recent.
Crosby and Malkin winning four championships would double what Lemieux managed as a player and, considering the salary cap, free agency, and the over-coaching of hockey, the three-peat, and the four Cups would rank among the great team and individual accomplishments in modern history.
Should Pittsburgh win, it would also mean four Cups for GM Rutherford, the third coming in Carolina, which would assure him one day of a spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame. There is that much on the line this playoff season for the Penguins. It’s personal yet it’s team. And the intensity with which Crosby has played in the past weeks leading up to the playoffs indicate the two-time Conn Smythe Trophy winner is ready to get it going once again.
“Sid’s got it,” Rutherford said. “He’s focused. He’s been there many times. He knows when to focus the most. He’s ready.”
The Penguins have an offensive advantage no other NHL team can match. They have Malkin, Phil Kessel and Crosby all playing primarily on different lines, three of the top 10 point getters in hockey all on the same team. Then they get together with the man advantage, where Kessel leads all of hockey in power play scoring.
Rutherford is a great believer in having three lines that can score, which is why he traded for Kessel three seasons back and has since added Brassard this year to take the spot Nick Bonino held the previous two years.
“I learned that with Windsor Spitfires in 1988 when we won OHL championship,” Rutherford said. “Our third line left winger was Adam Graves. He led us in scoring in the playoffs. And he went on to become the best NHL player from that team. When you get to the playoffs, it’s not about any one individual. It’s about team balance. The more depth and balance you have throughout the lineup, the more chance you have to win.”
Rutherford, a former goaltender himself, knows the depth he had in goal the last two playoffs with Matt Murray and Marc-Andre Fleury isn’t the same this year with Fleury gone. The team is ready, he figures, for a third straight Stanley Cup. The contenders, he says, are deeper than in other years. He won’t say it, just as he doesn’t like to talk three-peat, but he needs Murray healthy more than ever before.
If that happens, Penguins could be writing history all their own come June.
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