Gearing Up
Pens must find A-game before playoffs
By Bob Grove

During their sonic boom of an October, when they won 11 of their first 13 games, the Penguins went from zero to 60 so quickly it seemed that month had somehow been mashed smack up behind June, when they had earned a place in hockey history by concluding their championship run with victories in 12 of their final 16 games.

Had they really taken four months off? The relentless results came in night-by-night, and on the first morning after Halloween, the rest of the NHL awoke to this scary thought: maybe *they* were the ones with the Stanley Cup hangover. The Penguins were still the best team in the league.

But, alas, Pittsburgh's formal title defense was still five-and-a-half months away from starting, and for a team that had played an awful lot of hockey in the previous two seasons, including a trip to Europe, there remained the small matter of almost 70 more regular-season games. It hasn't been a small matter.

With the Olympics concluded, the Penguins began a busy March schedule-15 games, including two against a New Jersey team that has beaten them four time in four tries en route to a one-point edge atop the Atlantic Division-trying to find what Jordan Staal called "our sixth gear." Pittsburgh had played five games over .500 since those first 13 games, which is not bad but nowhere near expectations.

We're not talking here about the expectations of the media. In the same way that their captain, Sidney Crosby, has forged ahead in his career without a thought for his comically uninformed critics, the Penguins haven't wasted a moment worrying about any of that. They have their own expectations, and lately those have remained frustratingly out of reach.

"It's a good thing to know we can get better and that we have played better. We catch it sometimes," Staal said at the Olympic break, "but it's still not good enough. We have to find a way to play that way consistently. We're not there yet."

Given the play of the Washington Capitals, who were comfortably ahead in the race for the Eastern Conference's top playoff seed, and the second-half surge of the Ottawa Senators, the Penguins were at once a breath away from the No. 2 seed and in danger of opening the playoffs on the road. Sure, the 1992 Penguins opened a successful defense of their Stanley Cup like that, but history lessons aren't going to assuage that nagging feeling in the Penguins' dressing room that their game is right in front of them - if they can only find it.

"The frustrating thing for us," said Crosby, whose 42 goals at the break matched Alexander Ovechkin's total for the league lead as he reinvented himself as an elite finisher, "is that it's not like we're searching to find what it looks like. All of us are well aware of what our roles are. Every night we're going to have times where we make bad plays or individually we don't make the right choices, but it can't happen as often as it has (been). There's 20 games left. We've got to make sure we're improving and getting better, not the other way around."

That hasn't always been evident lately. The Penguins put together a solid defensive effort in a late January victory over Detroit, then the next night found another victory by pumping five pucks behind Buffalo's Ryan Miller, whose status as the league's best goaltender this season wasn't exactly dimmed by the Olympics. But that was followed by an uninspired loss at Montreal, a blown three-goal lead in a loss at Washington and a pair of blown third-period leads against the Rangers and Nashville at home, where Pittsburgh had lost nine of its last 17 games at the break.

"When we've met situations where desperation arises, big games, tough buildings, we've played more of the type of game we know we can play and we need to play," says coach Dan Bylsma. "At times, we've lost that focus. It's about becoming a good team; if we want to become an elite team and throw our 'A' game out there every night, and be a team that's as good as we think we can be, then that's something we have to address in terms of playing the start of games, responding after goals, coming out after playing a good period and re-establishing our game. Those are issues we have as a team."

Of course, there remained every possibility that Bylsma's team as he knew it at the Olympic break and the team he pushes toward the post-season will not be one and the same.

For starters, the Penguins will benefit from making their stretch run with left wing Chris Kunitz aboard and not in tow after he missed almost half the season with an abdominal muscle injury. And there simply was no quantifying the effect of essentially playing the entire season without Game 7 hero Max Talbot, who missed the first 21 games after off-season shoulder surgery, was a ghost of himself while trying to play too soon afterward and then succumbed to an another, unspecified, injury leading up to the Olympics. Talbot was hoping to return in March.

General manager Ray Shero figured to weigh in with some personnel maneuvers by the March 3 NHL trade deadline, having worked said deadline like a master builder the previous two springs. Since the Penguins have spent most of their money down the middle of the roster and always seem to be panning the horizon for a wayward winger with a scoring touch, among those in their sights this season were said to be Carolina's Ray Whitney, Toronto's Alexei Ponikarovsky and Columbus' Raffi Torres.

No matter the exact makeup of his final roster, Bylsma's challenge is to get the group spending more of its 60 minutes in the attacking zone, which is how the Penguins orchestrated their remarkable turnaround last season. They've done it only in fits and starts this time around.

"It's managing the puck, it's decisions we make with the puck about placing it behind the defense, it's… the plays we attempt to make in the offensive zone once we have it there," Bylsma says, ticking off the list of reasons why his team is not playing to its capability. "All factors that lead to us not getting to the offensive zone as much and establishing a forecheck when we get it, not holding onto it as a five-man unit in the offensive zone for longer periods of time.

"That's our game. It's not necessarily a high skill game or a chance game. It's about getting to the offensive zone, it's about holding onto the puck and playing there for periods of time. That prevents teams from having enough energy to get to their game, to get to their offensive zone. It's a puck management, puck decision, puck support game that we need to get better at. You can have an effect on teams when you play that way for 60 minutes, and that's something we haven't really gotten to as part of our identity yet this season.

Bylsma has mentioned this so often to his players that they can, and do, reiterate it almost verbatim in interviews.

Asked about Pittsburgh's schizophrenic forechecking game, Pascal Dupuis said: "Obviously, we need to manage the puck better, need to play in the opponents' zone and hang onto the puck a little more. Just tire teams down by the way we manage the puck. Everybody on our team can hold onto the puck in their zone and make the right plays at the right time."

OK, so everyone's on the same page from a tactical standpoint, but there's still the matter of execution. That's what the Penguins feel they must address in the final 20 games.

"It's applying it, bringing that every night," says Crosby. "That's the challenge every team is faced with. We can't be outworked and we can't be outplayed. We can't accept that. There are going to be nights when you are making mistakes, but the battle level's got to be there. We just need to find ways to win. We just need to be a little better at that."

Like they were in October.