Blue Line
Powerless Power Play
By Bob Grove

When it comes to New Year's resolutions, it's a no-brainer this year for the Penguins: a better power play. But first they have to get their collective brains wrapped around the idea.

Pittsburgh hit Christmas ranked last in the league, a shocking development that didn't prevent the Penguins from being near the top of the league's overall standings but nevertheless prompted a little soul-searching in the dressing room.

The result was the recognition that their lack of success had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with approach from the neck up.

"We've kind of approached each game the same way for a number of years, we've played together enough. . . it's not (X's and O's)," said captain Sidney Crosby. "We have the skill. It's a mentality. It's not one guy making a mistake. It's all of us consistently making one mistake here and there, and if you make one mistake here and there, half your power play is done and the chance to score isn't there. And the goals aren't there. We know what we need to do. It starts with our approach mentally, and with that we're going to see some good results."

As it sets up on the faceoff, the Pittsburgh power play should drip goals.

At one point is veteran Sergei Gonchar, who has produced more points over the last 10 seasons than any National Hockey League defenseman not named Nicklas Lidstrom. At the other point, after a December adjustment spawned by the Penguins' underachievement with the extra man, was defending scoring champion Evgeni Malkin.

Playing the half-wall on the right side is Crosby, another scoring champion, one of the NHL's best faceoff men and a guy challenging for the Rocket Richard Trophy as the league's best goal-scorer as the season approached the halfway mark. He was joined by veteran Bill Guerin, who has more than 400 goals to his credit, and Chris Kunitz, a puck retrieval expert who has scored one-third of his career goals on the power play.

These are explosive hockey ingredients, but through most of the first half of the season, the results were less incendiary than irritating. They included an eight-game scoreless drought, the longest since a team-record nine-game skid back in the Penguins' first NHL season - three years before even the 39-year-old Guerin was born.

"When you're on the power play, I think you forget a lot of times to have that urgency," says Crosby. "You have to realize that penalty killers have that urgency, that desperation, because they're a guy down. When you combine our skill with the urgency we can have, we're a pretty dangerous group. But you take away that urgency, it's much different. That's an area where, consistently as a group, we have to be better. It doesn't happen with one game. It's got to be a mentality. We've kind of identified that and we're trying to work on it."

Coach Dan Bylsma and his staff moved Malkin back to the left point, where he worked for much of last season while Gonchar was hurt, to displace both Alex Goligoski and Kris Letang, who had played that spot when healthy this season. In the Penguins' first two games with that lineup, the power play produced three goals.

"Right now, obviously, it's in our head," Letang said at the time. "Sometimes when you have something in your head too much, you try to do different things. Obviously there's a lack of effort on it. It's not a time to take a break. It's a time to attack them and put them on their heels."

The Penguins' struggles with their power play had sapped their confidence and taken their frustration to new levels. That was never more evident that during their morning skate for the Dec. 12 game against Florida, when Gonchar fanned on a pass to Goligoski during the team's work on the power play. The normally unflappable Gonchar tracked down the puck, skated out of the offensive zone and unleashed a slap shot into the side boards.

"I think the expectation for our players is what gets in the way sometimes," says Bylsma. "We expect to score; we expect it to be better, and so we get frustrated and lose focus because that expectation is there.

"Five on five, you don't necessarily expect to score every time you touch the puck. So you go out and do the right things: you get offensive zone time, you create scoring chances, you put teams back on their heels. Power plays are measured in goals a lot of times, and at times we've lost our focus because we don't get the result. We need to focus on the process: the breakouts and entries and retrievals. The set-up has to be better to allow us to get the zone time we need to have to let our skill and execution go to work. We'll get better when we get better in those areas."

"We think we know what we need to do," he said. "We think we have a clear plan. We're going to try to bring the same confidence and demeanor to our power play that we do to other parts of our game, because it is an area where we all know we can be better. And we need to be better."