WASHINGTON, D.C. – There were so many moments the Pittsburgh Penguins could have let a game they deserved to win slip away.
You had Brooks Orpik knocking Olli Maatta out with a questionable late hit. You had a soft penalty call on Kris Letang that allowed the Washington Capitals to tie it 1-1. You had the throaty Verizon Center crowd making your ears ring as the home team made a strong third period push.
And yet, at the end of raucous Saturday night, you had a 2-1 Penguins victory.
The team that chose to turn the other cheek is heading home with the series tied.
“There are critical moments in every game that arise and you have to handle them the right way if you’re going to control the result,” said coach Mike Sullivan. “We didn’t allow those types of situations to get our team down.”
There is an impressive makeup to this group. They haven’t dropped consecutive games since mid-January and even then they were both in overtime.
One of the major points Sullivan stressed after replacing Mike Johnston on Dec. 12 was the need for them to become more resilient and my goodness have they responded.
It was done with the playoffs in mind.
There is nothing in this sport that matches the dramatic crescendos of emotion we see in games like this one. The Penguins basically played with five defencemen in Game 2 after Maatta suffered a likely concussion on the hit from Orpik at 4:13.
That put a tremendous amount of stress on Letang, in particular, who wound up playing more than 35 minutes as a result. He had a mini-meltdown in the third period after he was called for tripping Justin Williams on what appeared to be a clean bodycheck, only to see Marcus Johansson knock the puck behind Matt Murray while sitting in the penalty box.
“Emotions, they all come out,” said Letang. “It’s a huge game, it’s a one-goal game, you don’t want to get in the box. Especially when you don’t think you deserve it. You don’t want to put your team in trouble and obviously they tied the game on it.
“That’s why my emotion was out.”
However, it didn’t seem to have a negative affect on his teammates because they came out with a strong shift off the next faceoff and wound up seeing former Capital Eric Fehr tip home the winning goal with less than five minutes to play.
He understands what Washington is trying to do in this series. It’s no different than when he used to be on the other side of this rivalry.
“The game plan was always to go after the top guys,” said Fehr. “I think that’s the game plan on every team against every other team’s top guys, because they play so many minutes, because you want to tire them out.”
Perhaps the most impressive part of this game from the Penguins perspective is that they somehow kept Alex Ovechkin and Co. to just 10 shots on goal through two periods. They had 28.
It was a much more dominant 40 minutes than you’d ever expect to see in a matchup of the two best teams in the Eastern Conference. That helps explain the method behind Pittsburgh’s focus on not settling scores, or getting drawn into retaliatory penalties.
They believe they have the edge at 5-on-5. They believe they can win by playing almost entirely between the whistles.
“I liked our energy, I thought we were controlling play, I thought we were coming out of our end zone very efficiently and we were hanging on to pucks down low underneath the hash marks,” said Sullivan in assessing those first two periods. “When we do that I think we’re hard to play against.”
The Capitals are a team that piled up victories this season with their skill, but they also have a sneaky edge to their game.
The NHL’s department of player safety handed Tom Wilson a $2,403.67 fine for his knee-on-knee collision with Conor Sheary in Game 1 and they’ll probably be calling Orpik in the wake of Game 2. The veteran defenceman was only handed a two-minute penalty on the play that injured Maatta.
“I thought it was a late hit,” said Sullivan. “I thought it was a target to his head. I think it’s the type of hit that everyone in hockey is trying to remove from the game.”
The Penguins had the NHL’s best power play in the first round, but have gone 0-for-7 to start this series with the Capitals. If they can find a way to break through on special teams they can truly make their opponents pay.
It’s something of a new-school approach. It’s a smart one, too.
“The ultimate goal is to win and we all have that in mind,” said Penguins captain Sidney Crosby. “We know taking that hit or taking that punch is going to go a long way. Hopefully we keep getting some power plays here and find a way to convert on them.”
“We understand we’re a good team, we’re a tight team,” added Evgeni Malkin. “We showed it today.”
