Powerless
Penguins Find Little Advantage In Man Advantage
A Potent Power Play Has Been a Pittsburgh Staple
By Bob Grove

Although the Penguins tried in training camp to downplay the effect Jaromir Jagr's departure would have on their attack, it's really no surprise that they've missed his ability to produce goals. Nor has it shocked anyone that an injury forced 36-year-old Mario Lemieux to miss more than two dozen games, or that Aleksey Morozov, Kris Beech, Stephane Richer, Milan Kraft and Toby Petersen have not stepped consistently into the scoring void created by the loss of Jagr, Lemieux and the injured Martin Straka.

The complete meltdown of the Pittsburgh power play, on the other hand, has been a stunning development and one that will deserve a large share of the blame if the Penguins fail to earn a 12th consecutive playoff berth this season. As the Penguins neared the All-Star break, their power play was converting 9.8 percent of its chances, easily the worst mark in the National Hockey League.

"The problem," center Robert Lang mused in the midst of a recent stretch in which the Penguins won just three times in 16 games, "is the power play. You have to score some power play goals. You just have to do it, no matter what."

Or pay the consequences.

Scoring with the man advantage has rarely been a problem for Pittsburgh, which ranked among the NHL's top seven power play teams nine times in the previous 14 seasons, including a fifth-place performance last season (20.3 percent). But the Penguins' ineptitude this season threatened to take on a historic tint; in the previous 18 NHL seasons, the worst power play on record belonged to the 1997-98 Tampa Bay Lightning at 9.3 percent.

Although the best offensive teams are those whose players are creative and capable of reading the play, all NHL teams approach the power play by relying on smart, quick puck movement, effective shots from the points, the ability to get to loose pucks and rebounds and the willingness to create traffic in front of the goaltender. The Penguins have ignored those tenets for most of the season, in the process driving coach Rick Kehoe crazy.

"You have to make the right decisions out there on the power play," he says. "Sometimes the guys out there have lost a little bit of confidence in making the right decision, getting the puck to the net when we have the opportunity instead of making that extra pass. We've worked in practice on getting it back (to the points), getting it to the net, getting guys in front. . . we have to get guys doing that."

Kehoe has tried almost everything to coax some production out of his power play. He's experimented with different defensemen and forwards at the points and used a myriad of forward combinations, and yet even establishing the power play in the offensive zone has been a challenge.

"We've tried a couple different things. We were dumping it in for a while," he said, "and we weren't getting it in hard enough and their goaltender was stopping it, and then we have to go 200 feet again. It's frustrating for the players, but it's also frustrating for the coaching staff. We go over that stuff and talk about it and show film."

And nothing changed until Lemieux returned in mid-January and the Penguins promptly scored a power play goal in three consecutive games for the first time this season. As expected, Lemieux's mere presence on the ice had a dramatic effect on the Pittsburgh power play and how opponents react to it. Over the last two seasons, the Penguins had converted 20.5 percent of their chances with Lemieux in the lineup and only 13.2 percent without him.

"When we get it in their zone, we're OK. But just to get it in there, we're struggling," said Lemieux, who was quick to point out that the better power play teams rarely gain the zone by dumping the puck. "We just have to keep working on it, try to get some confidence."