The Lightning's Slater Koekkoek slips a backhander through Antti Niemi. - AP

Penguins

Kovacevic: Loss to Lightning a letdown, though there's much to like

Oct 13, 2017 • 12:54 am

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TAMPA, Fla. -- Let it be instructive, at least in this infinitesimal sample size, that playing a second NHL game on back-to-back nights doesn't necessarily doom a team to being too tired to compete.

Provided that team doesn't doom itself with some bleak mindset entering the event.

At 3:43 of the first period Thursday night at Amalie Arena, the Penguins' Conor Sheary revved up his motor down the right wing of the Tampa Bay zone and, despite being defended tightly by the Lightning's Dan Girardi, was able to flick a shot on net:

Not bad for a tired guy, right?

At 5:02 of that period, Brian Dumoulin burst out from behind the Penguins' net and almost immediately had Usain Bolt-level separation on Steven Stamkos:

Dude's a much better skater than most might know.

At 6:56, Stamkos, long the owner of one of the game's most feared one-timers, met with the unwelcoming right big toe of Antti Niemi:

Great stuff, all of it. Even if I'm being flagrantly selective. Even if it was all in the first few minutes.

Well, Lightning 5, Penguins 4.

That was the final. And big whoop to that, I say. Because, at least from this perspective, the visitors will emerge stronger for the experience.

"I thought the fight was terrific," Mike Sullivan would say with his opening words afterward, referring not to anyone dropping the gloves but to his players' general performance. "We kept playing hard. We didn't play as smart as we've been playing the last few games. There were a lot of scoring chances on both sides. There wasn't a whole lot of defense being played."

Nope. The Penguins outshot the Lightning, 40-34, and the DeLorean might as well have been parked in 1987.

"It felt all along that we were just a shot away," Sullivan continued. "We just ran out of time."

They did. Matt Hunwick's goal at 10:01 of the third pulled the Penguins within one, and they kept peppering Andrei Vasilevskiy, rush after rush, registering 12 shots and attempting 13 others. And it wasn't until the ticky-tacky slashing call on Phil Kessel with 58 seconds left -- one that puzzled everyone on the Pittsburgh side, as I'll detail below -- that Tampa Bay could safely stash away the two points.

It wasn't some triumph, moral or otherwise. That much could be detected in a locker room that felt mostly frustrated at having come so close.

But on a night that matched the two favorites to return to the Eastern Conference final, on the night after they soundly beat the Capitals in Washington, then had their charter touch down here at Tampa International at 2:30 a.m., on the week after a similar scenario saw them get annihilated in Chicago, and in the season where they've got to cope with an NHL-high 19 back-to-back sets ... yeah, there are positives to cull.

I asked Justin Schultz:

I asked Evgeni Malkin, and he expressed much the same.

"We learned a little bit about playing back-to-back, I think," he said. "Everybody knows we have 19 this year, most in the league, and we needed to be better. I think we were better. We can be better than this, too."

I also asked Antti Niemi, who was burnt to a crisp by the Blackhawks but might have been one of the best players on the ice in this one, despite the five goals.

"We fought back hard. We kept pushing," he said. "I liked that."

What's not to like other than the result?

Let's cut right through it: These Penguins will be faced with a maze of thick walls they've got to penetrate if they're to three-peat, and this schedule is one of them. So the first step of that's got to be psychological.

Is it fair that they and the Senators, the other Eastern finalist from this past spring, have 19 of these?

Is it possibly part of some parity conspiracy?

Hey, maybe it is. Neither Gary Bettman nor anyone at league HQ would ever comment on something as fundamental as scheduling -- which comes with a myriad of variables, led by concert availability at arenas -- so we won't ever know for certain.

But, for the fullest context, consider that this might be about travel balance rather than parity.

Care to take a wild guess which team travels the least in the NHL this season?

Yep, the Penguins. Thanks in part to Pittsburgh's natural proximity to all points east on the league's map, according to a recent study by Yahoo! Sports, they will travel only 34,041 miles in 2017-18, the lowest such figure for all 31 franchises.

Care to guess which team has the fewest back-to-backs?

Yep, the Jets, with just nine. And it can't be coincidence that, because Winnipeg isn't near anything -- it's been famously spoken of the flat expanse there that you can watch your dog run away for three days -- they rank in the top five for travel miles at 43,296.

Next fewest for back-to-backs are the Canucks. Just 10. And it can't be coincidence that Vancouver is all alone in the Pacific Northwest.

So no, this shouldn't be an excuse, if only because it really isn't that unfair.

Go out there and skate hard. Worry later.

• The power play -- both power-play units, really -- were effective and aggressive while going 1 for 5 with eight shots, including their seamless transition from one unit to the next. Bryan Rust buried a rebound for the second unit in the second period, but that same unit also basically scored in the first on Jake Guentzel's redirect four seconds after a Tampa Bay penalty expired:

• Niemi isn't pretty to watch. As painters go, you'd want him working on your house rather than a canvas.

But the guy's got all that "compete level" we heard about all through training camp from Sullivan, and he worked relentlessly hard to make most of his 29 saves, even as he was plagued by bad bounces, late deflections and a millionth of a millisecond left on the clock when Victor Hedman's slap shot beat him to close the first period.

Still, this was an inspired bounce-back from Chicago, where he was as much to blame as those in front of him.

"I felt good, for sure," Niemi told me. "It was really busy there early, like a lot of our preseason games, so I was able to get right into it."

I asked Sullivan again if he saw Niemi's "compete level," and he replied, "Yeah, we did. It would appear that he didn't play well because of the five goals, but he made some 10-bell saves. There were a lot of Grade A quality scoring chances."

• The younger guys kept right on flying, and that's yet another potentially pivotal factor in the season ahead. Sidney Crosby was mostly sharp -- no points but six shots -- while Malkin visibly had a rough time, but Sheary, Rust and Guentzel stayed in top gear through the final horn.

Here's Sheary's beauty of a breakaway snipe in the second:

"It's a little nerve-wracking, a game like that," Sheary said. "I don't think it's a game a coach likes to see."

No, but it's good to see the freshest legs keeping pace.

• Someone asked the Lightning's coach, Jon Cooper, a human quote machine, if it was a style he didn't prefer to see: "We just won a hockey game against the defending champs. So ... any coach will sit there and take that and like the game. I don't know what else to say. I'm happy."

• OK, finally, to the Kessel slash:

Ever since Canadian wheat farmers began sledding across frozen tundra to find pickup games, that play's been legal. There's even a name for it: It's a stickcheck. It's a stick shaft coming across another stick shaft for the purpose of preventing the opponent from doing as he wishes with the puck. In this case, it's Kessel on Hedman, with the former hoping to keep the puck from leaving the attacking zone.

The NHL's crackdown on slashing is already as laughable as its countless previous crackdowns in that referees over-officiate the new guideline in October, then utterly ignore it come, oh, November or so. But since we're still stuck in the over-officiating phase, it's worth pointing out that this terrible call by Tim Peel cost the Penguins that 'last shot' Sullivan mentioned.

Sullivan's not wild about officiating questions, but after witnessing his reaction to this call ...

... I guessed correctly he'd bite this time:

• The Penguins are completely off today. In fact, they're taking the unusual step of staying here for the night as Sullivan tries to keep their sleep patterns in order.

WHAT'S BREWING

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STEELERS TODAY

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• Time: 10:45-12:30 p.m.

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