CRANBERRY, Pa. -- To be a professional athlete takes more than just a combination of remarkable size, speed and strength. It also takes an unwavering belief in oneself and one's ability.
Call it confidence or call it arrogance, but no athlete can perform at the highest level without it.
Kris Letang is hardly an exception. In fact, he might be the perfect example.
The Penguins defenseman is one of the most finely-conditioned hockey players, a physical specimen who has thrived in the NHL for a dozen years despite being small for his position. When faced with injury or adversity before, he had been able to overcome them simply with his high-end skill set.
A stroke in 2014? No big deal.
Concussion in 2015? No problem.
Neck surgery last spring? OK, that last one turned out to be far more problematic than even the 31-year-old could have imagined.
Last spring Letang was sidelined from February on, missing the Penguins' entire playoff run after surgery that required a 4-6 month recovery. He said during Wednesday's locker room clean out that it was basically "eight months of doing nothing, sitting at home."
Yet when the team opened training camp last September, Letang was back as if nothing had changed.
In hindsight, underestimating that injury may have been Letang's biggest mistake this season and there were quite a few of those along the way, most notably his third period in the crucial Game 5 of the Capitals series:
"It's hard, I thought I was going to be fine," he said. "I thought I was going to get over the hump maybe in the first few weeks of the season, but it didn't happen that way. Took a little bit more time. But at the end of the day, I have to be better."
Despite the surgery, Letang's offensive numbers this season were comparable to years past. He played in 79 games, recording 51 points to finish 17th among all defensemen. Mike Sullivan still played him extensively in all situations, averaging 25:20 a game, ninth among all players. But it was his decision-making with the puck and away from it that set off more than a few alarms.
His play was wildly inconsistent, exacerbated by a brutal early season schedule.
"Your body gets tired with back-to-back games. The second game, I felt like I was not as sharp," he said. "I think it was a little bit of the story with my first half. It was one good game, one bad game. It was tough to build because you always remember the bad ones."
Even in his best days, Letang has always been polarizing. He's a bit of a swashbuckler on ice, trading high-risk plays for high reward. When it pans out, it's great. When it doesn't, it goes spectacularly bad.
That pretty much sums up Letang's 2018 playoffs. He had 11 points in 12 games, good for third among all defensemen, and he even had the Penguins' lone goal in Game 6:
But the lasting image will be that of Evgeny Kuznetsov's breakaway goal early in the third period of Game 5 where the right-side defenseman was inexplicably on the left:
"Everyone has good games and bad games, but as a teammate, you couldn't have a more dependable, reliable guy that competes the way he does," said Sidney Crosby, who was drafted by the Penguins with Letang in 2005.
Nearly 48 hours after the Penguins' season had ended, Letang said that game and that gaffe were still haunting him.
"Made a mistake and cost us the game," he said. "I have good moments against Philly (in the first round), intense series. Had good moments against Washington. But in my mind right now I just see this game as a problem. It stings right now. It's right on my mind. It's going to take a couple days, a couple weeks. I'm going to try and forget about everything. Think about my family and just rest. That's how I'm going to approach it."
Letang will go back to his native Montreal this summer — where his wife, Catherine LaFlamme, is expecting the couple's second child in July — to train. No player will use this longer-than-expected off-season to train harder than Letang, who routinely posts his workouts on social media.
"I'll go back and get better, stronger," he vowed.
No one should doubt him either. He's simply too good a player. That was basically Sullivan's message to him when the Penguins broke for the summer on Wednesday.
"It was more just his consistency of play," Sullivan said. "We had a discussion about this, this morning. But by no means does it diminish what we think of Kris as a person. He's an elite defenseman and he still is. He had a particular challenge this year that most players don't have to go through. That would be my assessment of where his game was this year. It was up and down. He's a guy that we think is certainly one of the elite defensemen in the league."