On the one side, you have the Washington Capitals, who have three games (if they can make them necessary) to prove that their long-running act shouldn’t be blown up.
On the other, you have the Pittsburgh Penguins, seemingly a lock to win the Stanley Cup if they can just manage to lose one or two more first-line players in the coming days.
These were only a couple of things that you were left to conclude after Pittsburgh’s 3-2 victory of the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Capitals in Game 4 of their Eastern Conference semifinal, a couple of nights after Penguins’ captain and Hart Trophy finalist Sidney Crosby was helped off the ice feeling the effects of a concussion. The defending Stanley Cup winners seized a commanding 3-1 lead with the series moving on to Washington for Game 4 Saturday night.
Washington wasn’t outplayed. They managed to get 38 pucks on Marc-Andre Fleury and had another 24 shots blocked by Pittsburgh skaters. On the flipside, Braden Holtby made only 15 saves and another 11 hit Capitals defenders.
Washington was outcompeted.
"Our top guys didn’t step up," Washington coach Barry Trotz said.
Trotz was asked if one of those was Alex Ovechkin, the Capitals’ franchise player and arguably the greatest player in league history who has never made it to a Stanley Cup Final or even a conference final.
"Our top guys didn’t step up," Trotz repeated.
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Really, his original answer did not need further context. Hearing taunting cheers from the Penguins crowd, Ovechkin had two more shots on goal Wednesday night than Crosby, who presumably spent the evening in a dark, quiet room in Pittsburgh. Nicklas Backstrom had no shots at all.
Trotz’s counterpart on the other bench, Mike Sullivan, was effusive in his praise for his players. "I loved our compete level," he said, "Our stick-to-it-iveness."
Actually, it felt more like stick-it-to-them-ism.
Revenge, payback, call it what you will. The Penguins might have been inclined to physically balance the books by chasing down Ovechkin and defenceman Matt Niskanen, the tag team that knocked Crosby out of the previous game Monday night. No doubt, the home team was the more physical one—Penguins’ hits outnumbered Washington’s 40 to 30, although it would be all square if Brooks Orpik could actually catch up to half the guys he had in his crosshairs.
You might have thought that Game 4 would be an ugly one from the get-go given the trash talk in the run-up to it.
The woofing started from, appropriately, Jay Beagle, who wanted to rationalize away Niskanen’s cross-check on Crosby in Game 3.
"It should be nasty, it’s the playoffs," Beagle said. "That’s the way we like to play, that’s the way they like to play—hard hits, going after each other. I mean, these are two teams that don’t like each other."
The captain of the Penguins’ debate team, Phil Kessel, offered the rebuttal. "If he thinks that’s clean, then he’s an idiot," Kessel said.
"Ouch," Beagle said when reporters read back to him Kessel’s thesis. "That hurts."
The Penguins took a 1-0 lead less than five minutes in on a goal by Patric Hornqvist, who was arguably Pittsburgh’s best player not named Fleury. Hornqvist took a pass from defenceman Olli Maatta and skated down the middle into open ice between Caps blue-liners Karl Alzner and Orpik, who, at 36, looks slower with every passing game.
Hornqvist made short work of Holtby on the glove side. He also made short work of fears that the Capitals would roll over a Penguins team down not only Crosby, but also their best defenceman Kris Letang (gone for the season after neck surgery) and last year’s unlikely netminding hero Matt Murray (not dressed after doing up in his knee before Game 1 in the opening round against Columbus).
The Penguins took a 2-0 lead in the fourth minute of the second period. Credit on the goal went to rookie Jake Guentzel, his eighth of the playoffs and the least aesthetically pleasing one of the lot. Coming down wide on the left wing, Guentzel threw a puck past Niskanen and towards the low slot. Capitals defenceman Dmitry Orlov seemed to have all kinds of time to clear it, but instead wound up with a clinical finish, as they say in soccer circles, and kicked it into a yawning net.
The Capitals came back to square it quickly in the second period on goals less than 90 seconds apart by Evgeny Kuznetsov and Nate Schmidt. The home side might have feared that Washington was going to roar back against the short-staffed home side. It didn’t happen.
Just past the midway point, Washington defenceman John Carlson in the box with a roughing minor, Justin Schultz blasted a slap shot from the point past Holtby for what turned out to be the game-winner.
Thereafter the Penguins tightened the screws—the Capitals managed 29 shots in the first two periods, only nine in the third. For most of the last 20 minutes, the Capitals faded. A nice end point on it was a huge hit, percussive and perfectly legal, that Pittsburgh blue-liner Ian Cole laid on Justin Williams, the former Conn Smythe Trophy winner in Los Angeles who was brought in for late-season clutch play. Yeah, that was the sound of Cole letting the air out of Washington’s balloon.
To their discredit, the visitors self-destructed at various turns, the final one coming at the 58-minute mark. Washington looked like they were surging and pressing for an equalizer when T.J. Oshie got his stick up near the face of Nick Bonino—I say "near" here because the replay showed Bonino’s head snapping back to avoid contact. Not what a ref saw, however, and off to the box Oshie went.
"It was all will and not much skill out there," Hornqvist said in the winners’ dressing room after the fact. "Our compete level was really high."
And this has been said many times about the Washington Capitals by no one.
