February 12, 2015
Column: Penguins find healthy perspective
Blake Comeau is congratulated on his first-period goal by Evgeni Malkin and Simon Despres. — GETTY
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
None of this has been all that complex.
In fact, if surveying the Penguins’ problems spanning this starcrossed 2014-15 season, it can pretty much be condensed to these 15 words, spoken by Patric Hornqvist late Wednesday after that 4-1 rout of the Red Wings at Consol Energy Center: “We’ve got one hell of a hockey team.”
Wait for the other seven words. They followed a brief pause.
“When we’ve actually got our hockey team.”
Oh, yeah. The guy doesn’t just take a straight line to the net, you know.
Nothing could more directly sum up how and why this group, somehow 31-15-8 and a point off the Metropolitan Division lead despite a ridiculous 236 man-games lost to injury and cancer and blood clots and all manner of mumps, has found even firmer footing of late by shutting out Edmonton and Calgary and then — after a tired throwaway loss in Vancouver to end that trip — silenced an opponent that had won 12 of its previous 15 games.
These certainly weren’t the Oilers. Nor even the Flames, who’d won eight of 10 before the Penguins came to town.
“This was a really good Detroit team,” Mike Johnston said. “We’re aware of what they’ve been doing to other teams around the league, we needed to be ready for it, and I think we were.”
Which led into my followup question about, you know, how the Penguins have actually got their hockey team: “Well, you add Blake Comeau to the group, and you look at who we’ve gotten back in the past 10 days, with Hornqvist, Geno and now Comeau. That’s our whole line. And that was a very good line tonight.”
They were the stars, actually: Comeau, in his first game back from missing 20 games to a broken wrist, set up and scored the Penguins’ first two goals. Hornqvist, in his eighth game from missing 11 games to a broken foot and visibly struggling to regain his timing even through the Western Canada trip, scored and set up those same two goals. And Evgeni Malkin, who returned for that trip after a five-game absence of his own, was the centrifugal force making it all happen.
“It felt really good to have our line back together,” Hornqvist said, somehow without mentioning the obvious and dramatic upgrade of Comeau over the mercifully waived Marc Arcobello. “We have, Blake and I, kind of similar styles where we’ll get to the net and try to make room for Geno, get to loose pucks and try to finish plays. I haven’t been doing that so much lately …”
He drifted for a moment, possibly flashing back to countless chances squandered on the trip.
“But it takes time. It does. Even when you’re healthy, you have to get your legs back, your confidence. I feel like that’s coming. That’s why I’m happy for Blake to score right away. It takes a real weight off your mind.”
No doubt that was the impact. I asked Comeau about his celebration after scoring — a point-blank one-timer off a sharp, patient feed from Hornqvist below the goal line — and suggested it looked like half-happy, half-relieved.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” Comeau came back with a soft smile. “Honestly, I’ve never been out this long in my hockey career. You’re out there skating by yourself. You don’t feel like part of the team. It’s no fun. To get right out out there and get on the scoresheet and feel like you contributed … yeah, that’s good.”
Here, take a look …
Nothing too complex in any of that, obviously. Including the goal.
But then, none of this is. What these Penguins have done is win at a decent rate while missing tons of players, and what they have a chance to do now is win at a better rate than the mostly blah pace since the week before Christmas. They were 22-6-5 at the time, and they’re 9-9-3 since.
The latter, of course, has had much of the Penguins’ passionate but always panicky fan base out on the ledge. Fans want this guy or that guy to get fired, traded, released, waived, rolled under a bus bound for Wheeling, you name it. That’s the beast that’s been created around here, for better or worse, by a decade-plus of success since Sidney Crosby’s arrival.
But it’s never been more misguided, I dare say, than this season.
I mean, wow, what did people expect was going to happen when the top five wingers on the roster went down for long stretches? Or when the same happened to the defensemen? Or when key figures Pascal Dupuis or Olli Maatta went down for the year?
Johnston is another Dan Bylsma!
Trade all our defense prospects and fourth-liners for someone’s superstar!
This (insert utterly meaningless regular-season game) reminds me of the playoffs!
Where’s the passion with this team? Why don’t they care?
These aren’t fiction. I read this stuff every day from fans of this team. There was a slew of it even after Vancouver and that specific set of circumstances. And it blows me away. It really does. The expectations of this franchise have become almost surreal, surely unlike that of any other team in Pittsburgh. Whether it’s treating a trip to the conference final like a catastrophe, or not having both of the NHL’s leading scorers at any given point, or pouting each time a legitimate Vezina Trophy candidate or a legitimate Norris Trophy candidate makes a mistake … it’s spoiled. I’ll call it like it is. That is absolutely spoiled.
It’s unfortunate, too, because that cynical crowd is missing one truly remarkable season.
And it’s a season that, again, might be on the cusp of getting better.
I asked Nick Spaling after this game, in which he scored the fourth goal on a sweet tip of a Rob Scuderi point shot, about the general mood of getting players back …
That’s it exactly. Because, see, isolating on the Malkin line Wednesday doesn’t do this justice. Sure, it’s wonderful to have an entire second line return, but the equal effect is the spillover: The third line saw Spaling, Brandon Sutter and Beau Bennett freshly emerged from Chateau Bow-Wow, and that group obviously scored. Moreover, Bennett earned praise from Johnston for having driven hard to the net on that play, the primary focus of his scratches. Good for him. The kid was smiling a bit afterward, to boot. Sutter, too, looked sharper than he has in a while. And the fourth line, while hardly the caliber of other contenders, at least looked a bit bigger and nastier with Steve Downie joining Maxim Lapierre and Craig Adams. I’ll still take a replacement for Adams, but I’m by now wholly convinced that Adams will be skating a regular shift in Pittsburgh when all that’s left of our planet will be cockroaches, radioactive discharge and Wall-E.
It’s not a perfect roster. It could still use another defensemen, preferably one with size that rivals his mobility, especially if Christian Ehrhoff’s concussion issues linger. It might well need another winger, should Chris Kunitz fade back into the drapes again. But man alive, it’s a much, much better roster than some seem to realize, and that’s in no small part due to Jim Rutherford’s many sharp moves since last summer.
If you missed it, all four goals Wednesday came from Rutherford acquisitions.
It’s a happier roster, too. Don’t underestimate that.
“This felt good, to get out there, have all our guys and have that good jump,” Crosby said. “We finally have everyone. Now, we’ve got to build off that.”
Good health includes healthy thoughts. Those seem far more prevalent on the inside than the outside, and that tale is getting seriously stale around here.
