Behind the Net
Simple Twist of Fate
By Bob Grove

Between that first October night in Stockholm and the latter stages of the Eastern Conference Finals, there were plenty of surprises during the Penguins' 2009 season.

Miroslav Satan was signed as a top-six forward, banished to the AHL when it didn't work out and then brought back as a solid support player in the post-season. Pittsburgh didn't finish last in the league in faceoff performance for the first time in four seasons. A highly-skilled power-play unit struggled to achieve the league's 20th-best conversion rate. Petr Sykora's scoring touch went south and stayed there.

Then the Penguins lived through their version of the Valentine's Day Massacre. They lost a 2-0 lead and surrendered five third-period goals in a 6-2 loss in Toronto, home of a Leafs team that has missed the playoffs for a franchise-record four consecutive seasons. Michel Therrien was fired. At that point the move was not shocking, but had anyone suggested it in mid-November, it would have been laughed off.

You might remember the picture back in November. Therrien had just signed a multi-year contract extension a few months earlier to coach a team that had missed the Stanley Cup by two victories the previous spring and was off to a 12-4-3 start. But there it was. Therrien was gone, Wilkes-Barrre/Scranton coach Dan Bylsma was named his interim replacement and the Penguins were, clearly, in jeopardy of having their season end the night they peeled their jerseys off for the annual Shirts Off Our Backs promotion.

GM Ray Shero didn't have to spell out Bylsma's task. Bylsma had been a professional head coach for all of six months at that point, but he understood the Penguins would have to play lights out the rest of the way just to reach the playoffs. He chose to reach that ambitious goal with an equally ambitious 25-game plan: he would reinvent the Penguins, a trapping, read-and-react team with a mandate to "be responsible" defensively as a forechecking, attacking team. He would give them a game or two to figure it out, and then it would be onward and upward.

And it worked. Like crazy. Pittsburgh played .800 hockey over those last 25 games, and along the way Bylsma even managed to teach the Penguins to shoot the puck. That, alone, merited the contract he received when Shero removed his "interim" tag during the playoffs.

How surprising is the storyline? Consider this: prior to this season, only six coaches since 1927 had reached the Cup Finals after being hired during the regular season. That list includes legends Dick Irvin, Punch Imlach and Scotty Bowman along with the respected Al MacNeil, Roger Neilson and Larry Robinson.

No, we're not making any comparisons. And, yes, Bylsma was given quite a hockey team to coach, a team with arguably the best two players on the planet, who during the 2009 playoffs were so good they were taking shots at Mario Lemieux records - Sidney Crosby scoring 12 goals through two rounds (as Lemieux had done in 1989) and Evgeni Malkin surpassing Lemieux's record of five consecutive multi-point playoff games.

But the fact remains that of all the crazy things that happened this season, none has been crazier than the Dan Bylsma Story. Not crazy in a makes-no-sense way. Not crazy in a he-must-be-doing-it-with-mirrors way. Just crazy when you realize it was Bylsma all along who was the perfect guy to coach this team. All he needed was a chance, and serendipity provided it.