Kovacevic: Shoot puck, hit net, raise arms ... nothing to overthink

PHILADELPHIA --There's nothing to overthink.

"Shoot the puck," Carl Hagelin was telling me with a slight shrug. "Just do that."

Yep. Just that.

Shoot the puck. Hit the net. Raise the arms.

Which isn't to suggest that the Penguins did nothing else well in their 5-1 flogging of the Flyers in Game 3 of these Stanley Cup playoffs Sunday at Wells Fargo Center. Actually, that list runs encouragingly long, from the power play erupting to a fascinating new penalty-killing alignment to Mike Sullivan's aggressive line switch-ups to Matt Murray's superlative start to Sidney Crosby's four-point bounceback to all the requisite fun archrivalry stuff, too.

Lots and lots to like.

But I'd be remiss if attempting to engage in any deep, meaningful analysis here beyond the one area that matters.

"We need to get pucks to the net," Kris Letang would tell me.

"We need to shoot," echoed Justin Schultz. "The more we do that, the more successful we'll be."

I heard a bunch more of that, but the point's made. Even if it's made without speaking a syllable of disrespect for Brian Elliott, even if it's focused entirely on their own performance, the point's made almost as bluntly as it can be made.

Almost.

See, those guys can't go all the way on that thought process, but I can and will: The opponent doesn't have playoff-caliber goaltending. Not in Elliott. Not in Petr Mrazek or any of the available backups.

And while that shortcoming always was going to define this series, it was never more prominent than in Game 3.

Rewind to the first few minutes of the opening period. The Flyers hadn't dominated anywhere near the level of the crowd's calamitous reaction, putting a total of four pucks on Murray, but it still probably marked their strongest sustained stretch of the series. As Dave Hakstol, their coach, worded it, "That's the way we've wanted to play all along."

Huzzah for them. Because it was followed by this at 9:35:

Blame Philadelphia's Michael Raffl for the giveaway, as he's been virtually begging Dave Hakstol to scratch him since Game 1. But Elliott's got no business sliding that far outside his crease, even in guarding against Severe-Angle Sid. He took himself completely out of the play, and the captain smartly observed this and came all the way around for the wrap.

"It was good to get one early," Crosby explained, referring partly to his uncharacteristic misfires in Game 2. "And yeah, I think (it) was able to make a big difference."

He couldn't be more on the mark. That can't be a goal. It just can't. Not if you're the Flyers. Not after all they'd just shown out there. It's a killer.

The rest of the period would be pretty much a wash, a victory unto itself for the visitors, and the second period would bring a blitzkrieg, beginning with Derick Brassard's power-play one-timer that was a thing of beauty ...

... as was Evgeni Malkin's power-play criss-cross with Letang five minutes later ...

and hey, Brian Dumoulin hardly embarrassed himself with this top-shelf special five seconds — again, that's seconds — later:

I asked Dumoulin if, after seeing all those other pucks find the net, he'd had any other thought besides shooting on that rush:

That's what happens. Teams know when they've got a goaltender out of sorts, and then they shoot with even more frequency and confidence. It snowballs.

So while Elliott was correct in ripping his teammates for that Dumoulin scene — "We just can't really get beat off a neutral zone draw like that and have a guy walking down Main Street" — what's really missing for the Flyers is in his mirror.

Asked about any disappointment with his own showing, he said, "I’m sure just as much as any other guy in this room. I think we know that’s not how to carry over what we did last game. It’s kind of get back to what made us so good in the last game and we have a couple of days here to refocus and look at things. We’ll have a game plan, for sure.”

Will it include saves?

For the series, Elliott's given up 11 goals on 94 shots.

For the season, counting all of 2017-18, he's given up 20 goals to the Penguins in 251 minutes.

In Game 1, the Penguins chased him with five goals on 19 shots. In this one, it was five goals on their first 22 shots, with the latter winding up at 26. What's more from this one, each team attempted 55 shots, and check out the NaturalStatTrick.com heat map below that illustrates the disparity in the quality of those attempts:

Hint for anyone not into advanced stats: Elliott's not very good.

Even in Game 2, when he stopped 34 of 35 shots and impressively stuffed Crosby on that critical breakaway, he also allowed six pucks to clang off pipes behind him, he was beaten cleanly by a short-side Patric Hornqvist wrister, and he was still a chaotic mess with rebound control.

Small wonder Sullivan's been pressing his players to shoot more often and more accurately — the Penguins' seven power-play misses in Game 2, I'm told, had been extra-annoying for the entire coaching staff — and that's undoubtedly why he sounded mostly satisfied in that regard after Game 3.

“It’s not just shooting," Sullivan would say. "It’s more about making smart shots. If the puck doesn’t go in, then maybe it creates an advantageous rebound opportunity for us. Nothing breaks down coverage like a shot on goal because it forces decisions on both sides and, sometimes, our top players they can take advantage of those decisions if they win that puck."

Translation from Sully-speak: Put it on net, for crying out loud. No need to be picking corners.

Forget about Hakstol replacing Elliott, though. No chance.

"The first thing we have to address is all the penalties we took," Hakstol said, referring to the Penguins going 3 for 7 on the power play, when asked about his team's issues in this loss. "That's No. 1, but bottom line: Every part of our game, we can be better. Every part."

He loves Elliott. All of the Flyers do. They speak passionately of the respect he commands in the locker room as a 33-year-old veteran who both gives his all and speaks his mind. They glow all the more when discussing his recent return after a 53-day absence following core muscle surgery.

But give me all of those intangibles, add a nickel to this particular equation, and I'll still be holding five cents.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY