Kovacevic: Penguins pick apart Pekka ... as they do with every other goaltender

See, it works a little like this ...

Even if your team's wide receivers run all their routes like Antonio Brown, it doesn't matter in the slightest if the quarterback stinks.

Even if your team's batting order is raking from Josh Harrison to Jordy Mercer, it doesn't matter in the slightest if the starting pitcher's serving up gopher balls.

Pekka Rinne stinks.

On ice.

Twice.

So toss aside all other analysis of this Stanley Cup Final. Seriously, rip it up and pitch it in the can. Because there's absolutely nowhere to run, nowhere to hide if the individual manning the sport's most important position is playing poorly. And that, good citizens of our fair city, is precisely, painfully where the Penguins' opponents find themselves after this 4-1 throwdown of the Predators in Game 2 Wednesday night at PPG Paints Arena.



"They're opportunistic," Peter Laviolette, Nashville's coach, would say of the home team, a common refrain in these playoffs. "They've got some good players."

He repeated this, in essence, three times. And he undoubtedly meant it each time. But the cold fact is that, while his side played mostly fine in the early going, even struck for the first goal, this happened four minutes later:



That's the rear view, of course, of Jake Guentzel's tying goal at 16:36 of the first. And it's the most telling view because you'll notice that there's no hole under Rinne's left arm ... and then there is. Even though it never needed to be there. Guentzel had nowhere else to go.

What you see up there are nerves. Rookie-level nerves.

Then, once the teams emerged from their respective locker rooms after the second intermission all tied up at 1-1, surely all fired up for what probably would be the most pivotal period of the series, it took all of 10 seconds for Guentzel to break the tie, then another 3:18 for Scott Wilson and Evgeni Malkin to put two more past Rinne and chase him to the bench.

The Penguins liked it ...



... they loved it ...



... and they wanted some more of it:



That's it. Laviolette had seen enough. Rinne was yanked.

That's about all I've got to offer. Really.

I could laud the Penguins for pushing past the Bizarro Game 1. They pumped 27 shots at the Nashville net, 15 more than the the historic low of the initial debacle. They looked and sounded a lot more like themselves, including afterward when the captain cracked an actual joke when I asked about the upgrade: