Kovacevic: New Penguins mixing skill, smarts

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- They're called "hope plays."

Or at least they're called that by Mike Sullivan. And he's cited the term so often in his brief tenure with the Penguins that it's already become essential to the lexicon.

As in ...

"What you can't have out there are hope plays," Eric Fehr was telling me minutes after the 3-1 throttling of the Wild Saturday night at Xcel Energy Center. "You can see that there's a purpose now to what we're doing, a plan. We're not just throwing the puck somewhere and hoping it gets there."

As in ...

"It's just about being smart, about making the smart play," Olli Maatta would say across the room a bit later. "And when you play like that, you feel like you're more ... "

In control?

"Yeah, it's control. It's a comfortable feeling. It's hard to explain, but you learn to feed off that. You expect your teammates to do it. It makes everyone stronger."

Maybe instills a little hope, too.



Look, let's not go overboard here: The Penguins have won all of two in a row after losing their first four under Sullivan. They're still looking up at more than half the Eastern Conference in the NHL standings. And relying solely on results, as we saw under Mike Johnston, can be faulty.

But even if there are bumps along the way, as there could be Sunday night with a bigger, faster opponent in Winnipeg, what's unmistakable about the past week or so has been the progress of the overall process.

Everyone's free to focus on Sidney Crosby on this night. And it would be totally fair. The captain was ablaze from the drop of the puck, then scored one goal and set one up by Patric Hornqvist on the power play:





It's the hardest evidence yet that something beyond a simple slump has been behind his mostly miserable first 33 games. He was scratched Monday against the Blue Jackets with an undisclosed lower-body injury, he took most of the interim to rest and recover, then participated in a light-fare charity game just before Christmas in his native Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was there, as he was telling me in the morning, that he began to feel better about whatever had been bugging him.

"It just felt good," he said. "I knew right away."

It showed in the real thing, too.

"You could tell Sid had a lot more jump," Sullivan said.

"He was flying out there," Hornqvist said.

But he wasn't alone. And at the risk of being a big-time buzzkill about the captain's welcome revival, I dare say that what happened around Crosby was at least as momentous, if not more so.

The Wild under Mike Yeo have added payroll and skill, but they're still, at their core, built on blatant passivity. They'll wait and wait and wait until the opponent tries something it probably shouldn't, then seize upon it.

My goodness, they'll even wait when down two goals:



What a sad sight. Kris Letang -- who, by the way, told me he was "fine" after going through NHL concussion protocol for a Jarrett Stoll shoulder hit to his head in the second period -- did the above three times in the third period and each time was booed, as if he were the one doing something wrong.

"Hey," he replied when I joked with him about that, "why would I hurry when we had the lead?"

Well, yeah. And that describes the Penguins' plan for this game -- and, really, all games under this new coach -- as well as anyone could.

"They're so structured, especially in the neutral zone," Crosby was explaining to me. "So the first thing you can't do is get caught in your own zone. You've got to move it quickly and smartly. Then you've got to get through that neutral zone without a turnover, because that's what they're waiting for. And once you get to the other end, that's where you've got to work just as hard and just as smart to keep it there."

That's where the Penguins won this game.

That's where they ran up a 27-8 shots advantage en route to a 32-26 final tally.

And that's where, if you want to give the captain his real due, he made the biggest difference. Because he and his new line of David Perron and Chris Kunitz -- all three of them -- did dutiful work in forechecking, stripping, cycling, keeping their feet moving, using their outlets, then digging back into the ditches when something went awry.

This happened right away and set the tone, as Crosby confirmed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMOkqa3tDlQ

There is, of course, a thin line between stressing smart decisions with the puck and stifling creativity. And especially in Pittsburgh, it's a line that can be crossed to a coach's detriment, as so many of Sullivan's predecessors have learned. So it might be that the most vital ingredient is the buy-in.

One easily gets the impression that this coach gets that.

"It's about managing the puck in the critical areas of the rink," Sullivan began his answer to my question about showing collective smarts. "And when you have as much skill as we have, sometimes guys want to do too much in certain circumstances."

He didn't say so, but he meant the "hope plays."

"I'm a believer that I don't want to take the stick out of guys' hands," he continued. "You want them to make plays. That's what they're good at. We just want them to recognize the time and the place when they've got to make a simple play. And I think when we do that, we're harder to play against. We force teams to play goal line to goal line. We don't allow them to counterattack on us where we're vulnerable in an odd-man rush."

So, to condense it, then: Don't do stupid things in the defensive and neutral zones.

Or even, to a degree, in the attacking zone.

"There's a tendency, especially after you've been down there for a while, where you can make hope plays from down below the goal line."

There's that term. And in this context, he's referring to blindly flicking passes between the circles. Some coaches consider that smart under any circumstance and fault the absence of potential recipients when they fail. This one wants those attempted only after a target is spotted.

"It's a great way to start a breakout the other way," Sullivan added. "Which is why I thought we did a great job of using our points and forcing them to expend even more energy having to defend our guys along the boards. And I think our team is good there. We've got some dangerous people coming off the wall. They can be tough to handle. Honestly, that's where I was the happiest with our decisions."

You hearing this yet?

I've heard it and liked it from Day 1, even through the four losses. The man has a smart, simple plan, he's delivering it in easy-to-embrace language, and he's doing it in a way that sustains the creativity the Penguins must get from their top talent to regain contention.

Want another gem?

"I thought we had some balance throughout our lineup tonight. Everyone contributed. That's the type of identity that we want to create here. It's about the group. And for me, I feel like, in these past couple of games, we've started to understand the importance of that, how much we need each other to get to where we want to go."

You know, like having Fehr score the winner set up by Kevin Porter:



This might have been even more telling, if only because it came from the opposing coach.

"We looked like we were just slapping the puck around," Yeo said, snapping off each syllable when asked about the Wild's structure. "We looked like we were just giving up our garbage to someone else."

What do they say about one man's trash?