Kovacevic: Give it up for the defensemen ... yeah, really

Phil Kessel was fantastic, Evgeni Malkin finessed his way to four points, the power play's in some other stratosphere ... and I'll insist that the Penguins' foremost performers on this Friday night were their defensemen.

No, I haven't lost it, at least not totally.

And yes, I know the final score in flattening the Capitals was a 1988-esque 7-4.

But this past month that's seen your favorite club go 10-3 and pile-drive its way through most opponents has unmistakably begun on the back end. It's begun with the cumulative 200-foot play of Kris Letang, Olli Maatta, Brian Dumoulin, Justin Schultz, Ian Cole and how-do-you-do Jamie Oleksiak.

"It's a great group. It really is," the latter was sharing with me after what might have been the night of his life. "There's a lot of talent there, and there's a lot of things clicking."

He's understating it.

This back end, I dare say, is deeper, bigger, faster, slicker and meaner than either of the corps with which they've won the Stanley Cup the two previous years. And it just might continue to blossom into the driving force toward another.

Let's start with this, though ...

... since I can sense a whole lot of head-shaking for those having read this far. (Yeah, that means you.) Because I was watching, too, when Alexander Ovechkin scorched Letang down the left wing, this after Maatta was trapped up ice. And I know it wasn't a great backpedal or read on Letang's part. Ovi's used that move countless times, and he'll pull it off countless more, but Letang should be better.

With that out of the way, let's dig a little deeper ...

The Capitals love to gain the zone with speed and control, and no one does that better on their side than Andre Burakovsky. He's crazy fast for a player any size, never mind who's 6-3, 201.

Well, Oleksiak, at 6 feet 7, makes Burakovsky look like a squirtbug. And on the above play early in the first period, even though the Penguins are short-handed and Oleksiak isn't free to randomly pick an option for gap-closing, he still went hard at Burakovsky and swallowed him with the authority of a cosmic black hole. Letang smartly slides across to scoop up the puck.

That's in no small part because Oleksiak can skate, too, as he demonstrated with this rather aggressive rush later in the period:

It's funny that we've all been waiting all winter for Jim Rutherford's big trade. Maybe he's already made it by sending a fourth-round pick to Dallas for that guy.

I spent a good amount of time afterward with Oleksiak, who genuinely seems to be having more fun with each shift:

He's right. He's surrounded by talent.

Flash forward to midway through the first ...

Ryan Reaves had slipped in the Washington zone, and the Capitals burst back on a two-on-one. Reaves huffed and puffed but couldn't come close ... at which Dumoulin swooped in from out of the frame to overtake everyone and get a stick on the puck.

He doesn't score much, but the dude can fly.

Another from the first ...

That's another break for the Capitals, and it would have resulted in a tap-in for Lars Eller had Schultz not elected to essentially crash himself into the pipe to sweep away the rebound of Chandler Stephenson's backhander. Murray immediately skated back to the prone Schultz to offer a grateful tap of the stick.

This was from the second ...

There's no sizzling result here. It's Maatta seizing a clear -- and safe opportunity -- to help sustain the attack, then abandoning ship at the first sign his services are no longer needed.

Again, the defensemen didn't play a perfect game. Far from it. But all six of them were strong in presenting options for their forwards, not only on the rush when that sort of thing is common but also once possession had already been established, which is a lot trickier.

Moving to the pivotal third ...

The Capitals, short-handed, had an easy chance for a clear, and Eller didn't exactly mess around with his bullet attempt. Trouble was, Letang had zero regard for his health by raising his right hand to stop it, as well as the remarkable hand-eye coordination to pull it off.

All that sequence did was win the game, bringing a 5-4 lead when Letang got the puck through to the net for Bryan Rust's easy rebound with 13:52 left. And it began on the back end.

Letang looked lousy on the first Ovechkin goal, and he'll look lousy on other plays. He's a high-risk player. He's always been one, always will be. But Mike Sullivan and Jacques Martin don't have Letang logging 24-25 minutes a night because they're dopes. They scroll through endless video, evaluate each individual and provide their own grades, and I've been told No. 58's grades of late have been as high as at any stage of his career.

Also, hey, at least Ovi didn't get a hat trick, thanks to this overpowering stickcheck by Oleksiak with less than five minutes left:

Bottom line: This defense, with Letang and with Oleksiak, is superior in every way to the one that was parading the Cup around the Nashville ice a few months ago.

Remember the annual calls this time of year for Rutherford to bolster the position?

Not hearing a peep of that anymore, right?

There's a reason for it. If anything, it's now the position from which he's most likely to part with a player -- Cole remains the obvious candidate as a pending unrestricted free agent -- to acquire that third-line center. But he'll want to be careful with that. Subtract Cole, and Matt Hunwick's back to playing regularly. And one player goes down from there, and it's Chad Ruhwedel.

Might not want to mess with success.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY