CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- "One more! Hard!"
So they did it twice more. And harder.
It's easy to tell when Mike Sullivan knows he's onto something. Because he pounces on it, parades it all over the place, then speaks like a proud papa once it's come to fruition.
In this case, Friday morning at the Lemieux Sports Complex, Justin Schultz and Ian Cole failed to connect on a routine D-to-D pass at the defending blue line. It was just a five-on-five drill. No big deal. The puck caromed off the left boards, popped into open ice, and no one really pursued it.
Sullivan pounced.
"Ian!"
It wasn't clear whether the coach had chosen his culprit out of the partners, but it sure was clear when he and Cole went for a small, semi-private skate at center ice to discuss the matter that he wanted everyone to take notice.
That's the parade.
And then, when the drill restarted with Schultz's tape crisply meeting Cole's tape, the whistle fell from Sullivan's mouth as he barked, "That's it."
That's papa.
"We know how we need to play," Cole would tell me later in the locker room. "We've actually known that all along. But now, going out there and doing it the way we did in Game 7, beating that team, doing it in their building, having it feel so much like last year in San Jose ... now we've got to do it again."
The Penguins and Senators open the NHL's Eastern Conference final, the penultimate round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Saturday night at PPG Paints Arena. Faceoff is 7:15 p.m. Four more victories are needed, then four more should they again advance. Eight to go.
Here are my eight ways, in descending order, they can overcome Ottawa:
8. WAKE UP CONOR SHEARY
Yeah, I'm going to start by picking on someone. Because at the heart of any collective championship effort is the 1/20th in the equation.
No forward rose above in the regular season quite like Sheary, blossoming into the team's fourth-leading scorer with 23 goals and 30 assists in 61 games. He skated and created with consistency, and he eventually became a near-equal on the ballyhooed first line with Sidney Crosby and Jake Guentzel.
In the playoffs, he's produced less than Ron Hainsey: No goals, three assists, 16 shots over 11 games and a minus-5 rating. Worse, he's been responsible for some of the team's ugliest gaffes with the puck in those areas that Sullivan stresses the greatest caution.
I spoke with Sheary at length Saturday, and he swears it's coming.
"I really feel like the decisions with the puck are the big thing, not just for me but for all of us as a team," he said. "If we can do that better ... well, you just saw it in Game 7. We look like a totally different team. That's going to be my focus and all of our focus, I think."
I'm not recommending reuniting Sid and the Kids. I'm not recommending, nor am I foreseeing, any immediate change. Sullivan's practice Friday strongly suggested he'll stay with the lineup that did all those wonderful things in Game 7 against the Capitals. Carl Hagelin and Scott Wilson switched out at fourth-line left wing, but Sullivan reiterated that Hagelin is still "trying to push through" that recently broken foot.
But regardless of how Sheary's used, his production in these playoffs can't be optional anymore. Remember, this was the point where he best elevated last year. And with HBK still off the books, scoring depth has to come from all four lines, not just by having a formidable third.
7. HATE SOMEONE IN A HURRY
If you thought you enjoyed beating the Capitals, trust me when I say the Penguins enjoyed it only about a bazillion times more. Even after practice Friday, the blissful buzz could be picked up everywhere, from a reference to a certain play in Game 7, to a derogatory under-the-breath remark about one or more Washington players ... it was as if they were still at Verizon Center.
That's understandable. When a series is billed by many as the true Stanley Cup Final, pitting the top two teams in the league, the defending champion against the two-time Presidents' Trophy winner, and then it goes seven games, there's bound to be a little extra exhilaration.
But it's got to end by, say, the moment they roll out of bed Saturday.
I know this is Captain Obvious material here, but it's noteworthy that the real captain essentially brought it up Friday:
It shouldn't be hard for the Penguins to build that up. The Senators are in the same conference, and these franchises have more than their share of hostility over the years. Look over to the other bench and find Chris Neil, one of the last of the league's hardcore enforcer types. Or Marc Methot, who raised his missing finger a couple months ago in Ottawa as if it were part of a pro wrestling script. Or even, conceptually, the Bizarro owner Eugene Melnyk, who's still no doubt got his henchmen working on that forensics study that'll get Matt Cooke thrown behind bars.
Whatever it takes.
6. KEEP THAT PK PEAKING
It's been up and down for the penalty-killing this season, but not against the Capitals and the NHL's most dangerous power play: The Penguins wiped out 21 of 23 Washington power plays, limiting Marc-Andre Fleury's workload to 36 shots over those, or 1.5 per kill.
"Yeah, it's been pretty good," Matt Cullen told me through a broad smile at the mere mention of the PK. "We're staying aggressive, cutting off lanes, clearing the puck when we can."
The other positive is that it involved a wide array of players, as lineup shuffles saw Rowney, Wilson, Hagelin and Tom Kuhnhackl go in and out, with little variation in cohesiveness.
The negative now?
"These guys are nothing like those guys," as Cullen put it.
Right.
The Capitals' power play, for all the pieces it added, still works off the premise that Alexander Ovechkin needs to get that booming shot off from the left circle. Well, that didn't happen in the past round because Nick Bonino, Bryan Rust and others would wait in the passing lane and preclude the puck from getting to him. In addition to being far less painful than blocking an Ovechkin shot, it also basically cut the rink vertically in half for the Washington power play.
The Senators, as Cullen suggested, don't work like that. They're all about Erik Karlsson.
"I've played on a team with him before," Cullen said, referring to his single season, late in 2009-10, in Ottawa. "Everything goes through him. They trust him to handle everything. And they should. He gets the puck and creates things out of nowhere, off completely broken plays. It's not easy to defend."
It certainly isn't easier to anticipate.
And on that note ...
5. MAKE KARLSSON PLAY DEFENSE
I'm not going to underplay Karlsson's overall impact on the series, but neither am I going to overplay it. And I've got a couple reasons for this.
The first is that the Penguins can talk all they want about finishing their checks on him and wearing him down old-school style, as Hornqvist did in this exchange we had Friday ...
... but the cold fact is only Hornqvist will do it. And Hornqvist doesn't hit dirty, so he's not likely to do the kind of damage that the Penguins once got out of beating up Raymond Bourque, Brian Leetch or other No. 1 defensemen they'd wear down over a round. This isn't that team. This isn't that time.
The second is that, for all of Karlsson's righteous accolades as an offensive force -- and he's a legit Conn Smythe Trophy contender with 13 points through two rounds -- he's almost always been exposed as a defensive liability when facing the Penguins. And I've got no reason to expect that to change, certainly not if they sustain Game 7 form and aggressively attempt to force turnovers at all points on the rink. Neither the Bruins nor the Rangers, Ottawa's first two opponents, come equally equipped in that regard, to put it mildly.
Don't get me wrong: Karlsson will get his points. He's a tremendous talent. Watch this shot-pass to Mike Hoffman in the elimination game at Madison Square Garden this week:
That's just not right. Hoffman probably didn't even know he was about to score a goal.
But that doesn't mean the 28 or 29 minutes that he logs will wind up a collective plus.
4. WATCH ALL THOSE HOFFMANS
Where I think the Senators are best suited, potentially, to hurt the Penguins is with all those fun forwards. It's Hoffman, but it's also Bobby Ryan, Derrick Brassard, Jean-Gabriel Pageau, Mark Stone, Kyle Turris and Zack Smith. Each has enough speed and skill that, like Pageau did against New York, he can pop in four goals or whatever without raising many eyebrows. None individually approaches the level of a star, but six different forwards with at least three goals is striking stuff.
They're not very big, though, and they aren't bangers for the most part, so the challenge is wholly different than Washington.
"You want to make sure you're moving the puck, keeping them from building up an attack," Olli Maatta said. "There's a lot of different guys who can hurt you, so you really have to stay sharp."
Here's what the Penguins won't do: Trap.
And that's because, contrary to widespread public misperception, they didn't trap the Capitals in Game 7, either. They actually have no earthly clue how to trap.
What Sullivan and staff did to Washington, not just Wednesday but at various points in the series, was switch to a 1-2-2 formation when they lost the puck. But it never -- not once -- was activated into an actual trap, meaning the triangle formation that forces a puck-carrier to make a decision he doesn't want to make in the neutral zone.
The sole motivation and, thus, the sole result of the 1-2-2 was that Sullivan wanted to keep the Penguins facing the pick, one of his most frequent and passionate admonishments. The staff's reasoning was that the 1-2-2 would force players into a stance where they could at least pursue the puck from the front rather than from behind.
Nothing about that is a trap.
Now, on the other hand ...
3. BUST THE OTHER GUYS' TRAP
The Senators, under Guy Boucher, religiously stick by a 1-3-1 formation that does act as a trap through the neutral zone, meaning the first forward pressures the puck carrier, the three middlemen align to cut off lanes and/or intercept, and the back defensemen hunts cherry-pickers and the like.
Beating this was the theme of the Penguins' practice Friday, for which Sullivan added several of the Wilkes-Barre callups to conduct a controlled semi-scrimmage ...
... but nobody is overthinking how to beat it, as the coach openly suggested:
He and his staff have done it before. They go D-to-D, change the angle of the trap, then go up the boards. And it's hardly original. That's been the X and the O on this count for decades. It takes some patience and discipline, but it's eminently doable. From there, chip the puck past the defense to a targeted open space, pursue and retrieve.
Here's the other thing to know: The Senators aren't very good at this. A team that traps as a default can almost always be expected to rank among the NHL's best in goals and shots against. In the regular season, they had the ninth-best goals against, but also a minus-4 differential. The latter is a powerful indicator that the trap didn't result in the desired turnovers and odd-man breaks that lead to goals. They ranked 15th in shots against. In the playoffs, the shots against have actually risen, to 31.7 per game.
It might just be that Boucher, a crazy-intelligent guy, realizes that his team needs to trap.
Which might be because of this ...
2. TWO GOALIES ARE BETTER THAN ...
Craig Anderson's been one of the NHL's most inspirational players this season, supporting his wife Nicholle through her fight with cancer. It's to his inestimable credit, personally and professionally, that he bested the Bruins' Tuukka Rask and the Rangers' Henrik Lundqvist and did so with numbers -- 2.49 goals-against average, .914 save percentage -- that compare favorably with Marc-Andre Fleury's 2.55 and .927.
But the caliber of so many of the 19 goals Anderson allowed over six games against the Rangers, in particular, push any reasonable belief in the broader numbers to a breaking point. Because he wasn't good at all in that series, allowing weak long-range wristers, easy wraparounds because of his inability to play the puck and looking as wobbly as his crowned counterpart at the far end. What's more, against the Penguins, Anderson's seldom good, owning a 5-8-3 career mark that included a seven-goal blistering Dec. 5 at PPG Paints Arena.
Fleury's at the very peak of his career in terms of performance. He's never been better. And he and his teammates just took down two Vezina Trophy candidates, Sergei Bobrovsky and Braden Holtby, and did so convincingly.
Now, on top of that, Matt Murray's back. And man, did he sound like he was in a good place when we spoke Friday.
"I'm pumped. I'm ready to help any way I can," he told me before motioning over to Fleury across the way. "Watching what he's done has been a blast. I'm happy for him. I'm happy for all our guys."
1. 'JUST DEFEND'
This is a repeat of a repeat of a repeat in this space, beginning with the opening of training camp last fall, but there's never anything broken about the Penguins that team defense can't fix.
Sullivan pulled off the ultimate 180 in transforming that ultra-soft Game 6 into a Game 7 that had players harkening all the way back to June 12, 2016, in San Jose for the previous time they put it all together like that. But that's got to be the beginning or the breakthrough, if you will. Blocking shots isn't the base answer. Scoring goals isn't, either, because those will come through happenstance for a group this gifted.
"Now, we've been there. We've been back where we need to be," Cole said. And no one in that room's been pounding this particular drum more loudly the whole way. "We feel like, when we play the way we should, nothing can stop us."
Fine. So do it again. Harder.
CHRIS ORBAN GALLERY
