Kovacevic: Ridiculous schedule shouldn't obscure Penguins' progress

Nov 5, 2017 • 3:00 am

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- There's no satisfaction in losing to one of the NHL's most nondescript franchises -- the Canucks were born in 1970 and are currently tied with the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup championship standings -- so the Penguins shouldn't have engaged in any self-congratulatory fare following their 4-2 loss Saturday night at Rogers Arena.

And to their credit, they didn't.

Not even if they acquitted themselves generally well and dominated the shot clock, 39-21.

Not even if they battled back to nearly tie multiple times after Vancouver's 20-year-old Brock Boeser capped his hat trick with the winning goal at 5:56 of the third period.

Not even if it was the fifth game on an eight-day road trip encompassing all four time zones.

Not even if their 16th game of the season in 31 days represents the highest such total in the league.

But I'll be damned if this group shouldn't leave here feeling a whole lot better about themselves now than when they departed last week, the 1-3-1 mark notwithstanding. Because under normal circumstances, they'd blow out this bound-for-.500-again opponent. And more important, because somehow, somewhere along the way, probably between Winnipeg and Edmonton, they managed to right a lot of wrongs and got back to being the best version of themselves for sustained stretches.

With one exception.

"Couldn't score," Sidney Crosby told me afterward.

"Couldn't score," Phil Kessel told me afterward.

Right, but as I mentioned to Greg McKegg after he scored one of the Penguins' goals on this night, that's the perfect problem for this particular team to have, right?

"A pretty elite offensive team," indeed. And that's based on a whole lot more history than this ongoing eight-game slump with only a dozen goals or even this more recent stretch of terrific goaltending, including the Canucks' Jacob Markstrom, whose lateral movement -- a real shortcoming when he was with the Panthers -- was superb on this night.

Regardless, it'd be beyond silly to think any such thing will survive the coming week, much less color any significant portion of the season. As this, the Penguins' first goal on this evening, rather potently illustrates:

That, my friends, is what the hockey kids call sick. It's barely more than one full second of four players touching the puck, Evgeni Malkin to Crosby between his own bleeping legs to Kessel and right back across to Jake Guentzel.

I had to ask Kessel if he called for Crosby to let that puck through.

"Are you kidding?" Phil replied. "Sid always knows where everyone is."

Yeah. These are the guys, for right now, at the root of any alleged concern.

Don't get me wrong: There were shortcomings in this game, most notably in the form of Kris Letang being on the ice for all three of Boeser's goals:

Hoo-boy.

Those weren't all his fault. That's seldom the case in team sports. Still, his general form came with the look of a relapse to his first two performances on this trip as opposed to his subsequent two. He can be better, and he will be better. He showed on the Alberta leg that there are no longer any overarching worries regarding health, rust or whatever.

Me, I can't get past the fatigue factor. I just can't.

I saw this team over the past three games get back to tracking back properly -- its most glaring omission through the first three weeks -- as well as attacking and supporting the puck collectively, managing it effectively in all three zones and, intangibly, skating with their chins and confidence high. It had a good look, a good feel. And that, in the longer run, will matter more than any of the results.

But that schedule ... I honestly wonder if even the most passionate critics of this ridiculous opening-month schedule have focused too much on the five back-to-backs and not enough on the 16 games in 31 days, or less than every two days. And 11 of those 16 games were on the road, all across the continent.

"It's a f--ing joke," one veteran fumed to me. "There are teams with nowhere near this number."

He's right, F-bomb and all. Four teams were at 11 games entering Saturday.

"I don't understand it," another veteran told me. "What was the point of this?"

He's right, too. There's no point to a schedule that later offers all kinds of breaks of four or five days to open like this. The NHL doesn't answer schedule questions, not from reporters, not even from the member teams, I'm told, so there's no accountability. Just point to the computer, and c'est la vie. But the couple of veterans up there aren't the only ones within the Penguins who wonder if the league didn't try to stick it to them and, perhaps coincidentally, the Senators, the other Eastern Conference finalist and the other team with 19 back-to-back sets, in the name of parity.

We'll never know, obviously.

What we do know is that the Penguins boarded their overnight charter for the five-hour flight home with an 8-6-2 overall record that's not nearly as awful as it might have been, and they also packed up plenty of reason to dispel the Stanley Cup hangover facet that Sullivan correctly labeled "nonsense" after the Winnipeg trip.

"We didn't give up a significant amount of scoring chances, as I think that was in the single-digits, first time we've done that this year," Sullivan would say after this one, and the number was eight. Just eight scoring chances against. "I thought we generated a fair amount of chances, too. We liked a lot of our game."

Of the trip as a whole, he added, "As long as we keep trying to play the right way, it'll turn for us. We can see the players trying to execute the way we're practicing. Obviously, we're a little bit snakebitten right now. The puck's not going in for us. We've just got to stay with it. We didn't like the result tonight, but I thought the effort was there."

Or, as Crosby told me, "I honestly feel like our effort and our energy level's in a pretty good place. But ... "

Yeah, but the schedule. He didn't have to finish the thought.

The Penguins will be back to practice Monday. Later that night, the Coyotes, the league's worst team, play in Washington. And the next night, the Coyotes will play dog-tired in Pittsburgh against a fresher opponent.

Sounds like fine timing to solve some of these scoring issues.

WHAT'S BREWING?

• This weekend's Site Stuff is essentially a reader survey. But it's also got word of our next big PNC Main Street Meetup this coming Saturday in Indianapolis.

• Penn State's second tough loss in as many weeks is covered in extraordinary depth by Audrey Snyder in East Lansing, Mich.

• Flying home today! Woo!

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