NEW YORK -- Oh, he wanted to.
It's not like Mike Sullivan didn't have plenty he could have spouted off to the assembled media in the corridor outside the Penguins' locker room at Madison Square Garden late Wednesday night. He'd just witnessed his boys basically checking off every box of things he hates, after which the Rangers and Mika Zibanejad buried them, 4-3, in overtime.
So as Sullivan came our way, his stride purposeful, his expression stern, I allowed myself to wonder if this might be it. If this might finally be the moment he generates a juicy headline.
Nope.
This was as hot as it got:
Stop the presses, right?
That's what you get. Sully's Sully all the time. He's honest. He's genuine. But he never leaves his coach's skin while doing the coaching thing. Every move, every exchange with everyone in a hockey setting is aimed, in some form, at winning. He sees every tiny piece of the puzzle as somehow counting toward that.
I've learned this about him over the years and respect it more than I can say. Because, particularly given his fire, it can't be easy.
This past Sunday night back home, Ken Hitchcock, the Stars' oldest-of-old-school coaches, went on this weird rant about how his "top players" were, for lack of a more direct term, less than courageous. He accused them of "waiting for power plays." He spoke of "desire." He didn't name names, but he was wagging the figurative finger at Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn.
Watch and cringe for yourself:
I was there. It was awkward. And not just because as I was about to ask him a harmless question about the Penguins' speed, he said, "Thanks," and huffed off.
Here's the thing: Players don't see and hear every word their head coach speaks. But they hear some. They hear enough. And the coaches who grasp that use it to their advantage. They'll send hints or messages through us and, by extension, through you, and they'll hope it reaches the athlete.
Sullivan's sharply aware of this. But he chooses to use that to show respect. He'll go public with criticism about the team, maybe even poke politely at an individual. But he'll never do what Hitchcock did.
Will that lose him some points on social media or talk shows?
Sure. Fans love when a coach goes DEFCON 1 after a tough loss. It makes the coach feel relatable. It makes the fans feel like someone other than them is suffering.
But Sullivan's right to be a whole lot more focused on what Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and the rest think. If he wants their respect, he's got to earn their respect. And not by force.
• The Penguins stunk in the third period. Really, it was as bad as they've been in a long while. They did a ton of things they don't normally do.
But they also have another game tonight in Montreal. And before long, playoffs. And they're two-time champions, many of them, who don't need anyone to spell all of that out for them.
Give me the coach who never stops focusing on the finish line.
• Never let it be spoken that nothing good comes from a lousy loss.
This was from the first period, in which the Penguins were exceptionally efficient all over the rink:
• 
That up there is Jamie Oleksiak chasing down the fleet-footed Zibanejad, then swinging around upon seeing Zibanejad's drop pass to Chris Kreider, then coolly collecting the puck after Kris Letang breaks up the play, then -- and this is far the best part -- keeping the presence of mind to raise his chin, look for an outlet and bank an outlet off the right boards and onto the blade of Jake Guentzel.
This guy was stolen for a conditional fourth-round pick.
• More Riley Sheahan. Less of people stealing Sheahan's ice time.
No, I'm not referring to Derick Brassard. He'll be a lot better soon and, besides, he had a decent night, including this setup of Bryan Rust's welcome-back icebreaker in the second period:
I'm talking about anyone who's a winger who isn't performing as well as Sheahan is. He shouldn't get cast onto the fourth line just because he's a center and that's what the depth chart dictates. Sullivan used him on the Crosby line in the third period rather than Conor Sheary. He's worked him into other activity, too. More of that.
Sheahan created all kinds of disturbance in the New York zone before smartly whipping through the front to deflect Letang's equally smart half-slapper for the Penguins' second goal:
He's got to play.
• Alain Vigneault had essentially announced that this start for 22-year-old Alexandar Georgiev, his NHL career barely a month old, would represent part of an audition as to whether he might be Henrik Lundqvist's backup next season.
Not to be that guy, but that kid showed more mental toughness in this game than Lundqvist's shown in his past 10 meetings with the Penguins. He was peppered with 27 shots through the first two periods, stopped four breaks, then overcame his own silly mistake -- a penalty shot was awarded to Evgeni Malkin with 10.7 ticks left in regulation when he popped the net off its moorings -- by doing this:
That wasn't Malkin's B-button move, to put it mildly, but Georgiev took away everything. He even accounted for the final forehand by reaching out with the pokecheck.
"I just wanted to be patient with him," Georgiev said. "I wanted to wait for his maybe first, maybe second, third move."
That was one of 36 saves. This keeper could be a keeper.
• The way the Penguins were flying in the first, they'd have put four behind Lundqvist, and he'd have deliberately thrown his net off the moorings.
• Malkin would want that shot again 1,000 times over, but his line with Patric Horqnvist and Carl Hagelin owned the ice most of the night and was the only one Sullivan could truly trust in the third period.
Not this or even Hagelin's powerful wraparound goal late in the third ...
... offered him an exception to take blame.
"All of the forwards stopped coming back in the third period," Hagelin said. "We left our D-men out to dry. It's unacceptable."
• They left Casey DeSmith out to dry, too, but he was in no position to complain. No rookie ever is, which is why it was amusing to observe him answering questions about how irresponsible his teammates were in front of him.
"I think they came out pretty hard in the third," DeSmith said of the Rangers. "And we didn't quite match that, I guess."
Future diplomat!
• Had a good talk with the Rangers' Jimmy Vesey, who signed with New York as a collegiate free agent just as Zach Aston-Reese did with the Penguins, about their similar paths. Vesey, 24, is in his second NHL season out of Harvard and was fresh off a hat trick two nights earlier against the Hurricanes. Aston-Reese, 23, is a rookie out of Northeastern and had four goals in his first 10 NHL games before a lower-body injury Feb. 24 put him out long-term.
"When you come in later -- and he's around my age -- you're bigger, stronger, more mature from having four years of college," Vesey said. "But in the same token, the seasons are so different. Here you're playing every other night, where in college it's Friday and Saturday. I think, for me, at the beginning, I started out like a bat out of hell."
He burst out laughing there, but it's legit: He had six goals in his first 10 NHL games, this to open the 2016-17 season.
Sound familiar?
"But then, maybe the schedule or whatever, I wasn't used to it," Vesey continued. "I definitely went through some lulls in my season. So it's great to see him get off to a good start. I like to see other college guys do well. I think we all do. But he'll probably come back from this injury all the better because he'll have had some time off."
• No reasonable hockey fan outside an Original Six market sheds a tear when any of them sputter. But these upcoming playoffs will see these Rangers, the Canadiens we'll see Thursday night, plus the Red Wings and Blackhawks, all sitting out.
That's at least a little uncomfortable, isn't it?
No?
OK, never mind. Montreal's next.