Kovacevic: Game 2 was weird, stupid, unfortunate, though hardly cause for worry

Sidney Crosby had the puck at the beach and missed the ocean.

The power play took enough shots to fill the ocean and missed the planet.

Patric Hornqvist was penalized for thrusting his own face into the end boards.

Kris Letang accidentally bumped a rebound into his own net, then was accidentally -- allegedly -- bumped by Claude Giroux skating backward with enough force to send him into concussion protocol.

Oh, and an opponent that had looked utterly unraveled two nights earlier somehow, with a seeming flick of the wrist, flipped the broader script.

"That's hockey."

Matt Murray spoke those two words to me, soon after he and the Penguins had fallen, 5-1, to the Flyers in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs Friday night at PPG Paints Arena, and they so succinctly summarized what had just taken place that I asked if I could borrow them for this column.

"As a quote?" he came back.

No, man, the whole column. The headline, even.

Because really, that's it. Sometimes weird, stupid, unfortunate things happen when bodies and blades and vulcanized rubber are bouncing around for three hours, and this undoubtedly was one of those.

But since I won't get away with a two-word column, and since there's bound to be the standard public angst following any playoff loss, let's shoot instead for a twin-concept column that will take an unfettered look at potential reasons for worry, weighed against their potential legitimacy.

Sound fair?

Cool. Here we go:

Reason to worry: The Penguins might not have taken the Flyers seriously because Game 1 was a 7-0 slaughter.

Reason to not: Baloney.

From the opening faceoff, the Crosby line spun and whirled through the Philadelphia zone, and Jake Guentzel would have had a Bryan Rust-like quick strike had Brian Elliott not been that much quicker with the glove:

Rust nearly tipped one home later that shift. And otherwise, all else would be sustained: The Penguins outshot the Flyers, 11-6, in the first period, then 12-7 in the second, and 35-20 for the night. They attempted 59 shots to the Flyers' 30. And digging into the advanced stats, they held an astounding possession edge, 66 percent to the Flyers' 34.

I mean, it's hard to do that and lose by any score, never mind by four.

As Letang would put it, "I think we dictated most of the game."

They really did. And to repeat, they did so from the outset, so this wasn't about coming out flat or whatever narrative tends to define dramatic turnarounds like this.

Reason to worry: The Flyers finally got some goaltending.

Reason to not: Well, they did get more goaltending. Elliott deserves everything he'll hear over the next 48 hours, including what's sure to be a thunderous roar when introduced Sunday for Game 3 at Wells Fargo Center. He's only recently come back from a two-month absence for core muscle surgery, and he was scorched left and right in the series opener to get pulled by a coach who adores him. He'd finish this one with 34 saves, and a few of them were sharp.

None was better than beating Crosby on a 150-foot breakaway in the second, when the score was 2-0:

Sid's trademark is to go five-hole, but Elliott had that sealed, then moved across to his left to elevate the glove and match what would have been a fine finish.

“You don’t really have that much time to think," Elliott said. "You just try to be aggressive and play it like any other breakaway. He’s got a lot of moves, I’m sure."

"Big turning point," Crosby called it. "If I put that in ..."

OK, but for Elliott?

By my count, the Penguins clanged five pucks off the posts behind him, and two of those weren't remotely threatening. Neither was their lone goal, this Hornqvist short-side wrister from the dot:

Not feeling the Elliott renaissance yet.

Reason to worry: Murray.

Reason to not: Come on.

On the Flyers' first goal, Shayne Gostisbehere's power-play whip from the right point, Riley Sheahan was late coming across to cover and Brian Dumoulin might as well have hung dark drapes in front of his goaltender:

That snapped Murray's playoff shutout streak, dating to the Final last summer, to 225 minutes, 49 seconds.

On the second goal, he correctly steered a bad-angle shot toward the corner, only to have it plop behind him off Letang's torso:

"Bad luck," Murray would say, and he was right.

"He did everything right," Letang said of Murray. "I had two guys in front, and I went over to Giroux because he's dangerous with the one-timer. But the puck hit me and goes in. What are you going to do?"

That was 2-0.

I wasn't wild about the backbreaker by the Flyers' Travis Konecny early in the third:

Chad Ruhwedel didn't need to get beaten up the wing as he did, even if Konecny's got exceptional speed. But he still was back solidly enough that Konecny was limited to nothing more than the short-side shot he took. And in a playoff game, that's got to be stopped.

The Flyers' fourth goal was a power-play slam dunk for Nolan Patrick, the fifth an empty-netter. So we're talking about one meh goal out of the five as it relates to Murray, and that's hardly some significant regression.

"Just one of those games," Murray said.

Right. That's hockey.

Reason to worry: The power play's been bad in this series, going 0 for 4 with three shots, and this after the first unit fired blanks in Game 1.

Reason to not: The solution's painfully simple: Stop missing the net all the time. I've got a separate analysis on that.

Reason to worry: The penalty-killing's been bad for a couple months now, and the Flyers going 2 for 3 isn't exactly encouraging in that regard.

Reason to not: Got nothing here. It's a real worry. It's why I wrote before this series that it would go six games rather than five.

Sheahan's lateness to the right point on Gostisbehere led to the first power-play goal, but the second, that slam dunk by Patrick, was far worse:

Yikes.

There's only one motivation in penalty-killing for collapsing a box like that, and it's to cut off all the options down low. Olli Maatta puts himself in no-man's land on the initial dish by Jakub Voracek. Jamie Oleksiak is entrusted to cut off Sean Couturier's blind backhand pass there and doesn't. Tom Kuhnhackl's waiting for a shot to block, but he's low enough to make a difference.

"We all need to be better," Maatta would say.

It's exceptional puck movement by the Flyers. Equally, it's exceptionally poor penalty-killing. Which has been par for the course.

Worry about this from now till mid-June.

Reason to worry: Crosby was off.

Reason to not: (Crickets chirping)

He missed a breakaway, then this glorious power-play feed from Phil Kessel with three ticks left in the second ...

... then hit the post in the third, making for a hat trick of a different sort, for which his stick shaft would pay the ultimate price.

"Yeah, I was ... I mean ... you can't hesitate," Crosby said. "I was in between whether to stop it or one-time it with how much time was left in the period. Still ... I mean, you've got to find a way to put that in, regardless."

That sequence moved Dave Hakstol, the Flyers' coach, to observe, “He doesn’t miss often. The other night, he didn’t miss at all, so maybe that balanced out. That’s the game of hockey.”

Hey, that line's taken.

Reason to worry: Letang really got rocked there.

Reason to not: He did come back a few minutes after the collision with Giroux, and he assured me afterward -- without delving into any detail or even confirming that he'd been in concussion protocol, though that couldn't have been more obvious -- that he's "fine."

The collision itself ...

I don't like it. It's always difficult to prove intent. But Giroux's eyes are on Letang before he skims off Crosby, and they never unlock. From there, his rear end makes one final thrust into Letang.

It reminds me of a very similar hit on Guentzel in Buffalo by Rasmus Ristolainen, this on Dec. 1, 2017:

Other than the pinball with Crosby, what's the difference?

That earned Risolainen a five-minute major for interference and a game misconduct on the spot, followed by a three-game NHL suspension.

Speaking of officiating ...

Reason to worry: The refs stink.

Reason to not: The sky is blue.

This is almost always the subject of choice following a playoff loss, and Wes McCauley and Tim Peel made a couple of messes. But not a soul on the Penguins' side was complaining about officiating, other than one passing mention I picked up about McCauley's bizarre call in the third that sent Hornqvist and the Flyers' Andrew MacDonald off with matching minors even though MacDonald's was for, you know, crosschecking the former into the boards.

Hornqvist's charge was embellishment:

I can see Hornqvist's exaggeration there with the arms flailing after hitting the boards. But it's probably healthy to say this out loud to hear how stupid it is: The official deemed MacDonald guilty of crosschecking a player into the boards, and we know that because he called that. Hence, the same official deemed a move to make sure that official was paying attention to be worthy of equal punishment.

The embellishment rule, when the NHL introduced it earlier this decade, was intended to stop outright dives. That's not what this was, and we know that, again, because the official himself said so. This isn't a dive. It's a reaction after the completed action. And thus, it means absolutely nothing.

Don't mean to go on about this. The sequence itself meant nothing, either. Nor did the officiating, which will be bad in Games 3 and 4, and all the other games that follow.

Reason to worry: The Flyers have life.

Reason to not: Do they?

Look, full credit to all concerned. I was questioning if they'd registered a pulse in Game 1. All of them, but especially Elliott, shook off any stigma, survived the Penguins' early rush and came away with the result.

Hakstol had every right to crow a little afterward in saying, "I think we just introduced ourselves to the series."

At the same time, his roster's built on offense, and other than a couple of quality power-play goals and a fine individual effort by Konecny, it's still not happening on any sustained level. Certainly not five-on-five.

Take it from the head coach: The Penguins were just fine.

"We had a lot of zone time, a lot of opportunities, and I thought we had a lot of opportunities to shoot the puck more," Mike Sullivan said. "Listen, Philly's a good team, too. But it's not like there weren't parts of the game we didn't like. There were a lot of parts that we did like. We just couldn't seem to find the back of the net."

The captain echoed that stance.

"That's the way it goes sometimes," Crosby said. "For the most part, we limited their chances, and we had some good ones ourselves. We've got to find a way to put those in, but ... I mean, we did some good things."

The goaltender did, too:

Reason to worry: Because that's what Pittsburghers do.

Reason to not: See Murray's headline.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY