Tim Benz: Lightning coach's quotes tell story of Penguins' win in Tampa — and how they need to play moving forward
What a win for the Pittsburgh Penguins Tuesday night.
They went on the road in front of a hostile crowd for the season opener and convincingly upset one of the favorites to win at least the conference championship.
I now fully expect them to lose to Vegas, Cincinnati and Green Bay in dreadful offensive fashion.
Looming Steelers analogies aside, the Penguins were impressive while drubbing the defending Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning 6-2 on their banner raising night.
“They came here to win a hockey game,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “We came here and watched the banner raising. Then we watched a team try to win a hockey game. We did a lot of watching tonight.”
Cooper wasn’t done.
“We could’ve played Pittsburgh’s farm team tonight and seen the same results,” Cooper said.
Psst! Who wants to be the one to tell him that’s kinda what happened?
After all, that group of Penguins took the ice without Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Jake Guentzel, Mike Matheson and Zach Aston-Reese. Yet as Cooper pointed out, you wouldn’t have known the Penguins were missing their stars by the results.
“They beat us to every puck, they worked harder than us. They were better than us in every facet of the game,” lamented Cooper.
It was interesting to hear the coach of the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions bemoan how his team was beaten by a plucky, determined, energetic group of hustling starless skaters who stayed true to a system and remained focused on the task at hand while playing simple hockey.
Hmm. Have hockey fans in Pittsburgh ever witnessed that skate being on the other foot? Gosh, what’s that like?
“I thought we came out with a lot of energy,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said after the win. “I thought we were playing the game that we were trying to play. We were doing everything in fives in all three zones. And that’s when our team is at its best.”
True. In fact, according to the Penguins media relations staff, since the beginning of the 2006-07 season, Pittsburgh has played just 52 games without both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in the lineup. In those 52 games, the Penguins have gone 31-15-6 (.654 points percentage).
But those traits Sullivan extolled don’t necessarily have to manifest only when the Penguins are playing without their best players. Believe it or not, the team is allowed to play in that same style when the likes of Crosby, Malkin and Guentzel are on the ice with the rest of the team.
When those guys are healthy, the collective group doesn’t have to revert to a mentality of, “Let’s beat the other team with speed (that may not exist quite as much as it once did), attempt to wow them with skill (that may be slipping), set the star players up to do their thing and hope they are having a hot night.”
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. But too often over the last three years — and quite a few between the 2009 and 2016-17 Stanley Cups — that seemed to be the case.
At least during the playoffs anyway.
Regardless of their on-ice approach, over the previous 15 years, the Penguins have been good enough to make the playoffs. That prospect is in doubt this year, especially with the team forced to take the ice without Malkin (long term) and Crosby and Guentzel (short term) to begin the season.
So getting off to that good start against the Lightning was extremely beneficial. But perhaps nowhere close to as beneficial as the lesson put forth by those that dressed in how to execute the game plan once the opening puck is dropped.
Now it’s just a matter of following that blueprint for the next 81 contests, starting Thursday night against the Florida Panthers in Sunrise, Fla.
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
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