ANAHEIM, Calif. -- "It's a good hockey team."
This was Jim Rutherford. And this came in a conversation we were having a few hours before the Penguins' outrageously energetic 7-4 comeback over the Ducks on this Friday night at the Honda Center, one in which they gave up the first three goals, then another of those awful short-handed breakaway goals after they'd tied ... then pretty much willed their way into all four scores of the final period.
Yeah, it's a good hockey team. Bordering on being much more.
Because it's one thing to rattle off a 15-3-1 run like what's been witnessed since early December. It's another to take six in a row now on the road, two shy of the franchise record. It's yet another to have all this happen through every facet of hockey. But it's quite another to roll it all together behind a disciplined foundation being built through universal buy-in.
"Anytime you come back from a three-goal deficit, I think it's a great character-builder," Mike Sullivan would say afterward. "We felt like we were playing well even when it was 3-0 after the first period. And that's what we said to the players. We told them, 'There's a lot of hockey left. We have the firepower. Let's just stay with it, stick to the game plan, and we can come back.' And ... I give our players a lot of credit for their stick-to-it-ive-ness."
That's not coachspeak, and it's definitely not as fun as the highlights that'll follow. But this outcome, as well as the bulk of what's led into it ever since they stopped behaving like herded strays, came from a collective belief in what the Penguins are supposed to be doing. No matter the score. No matter the situation. No matter the opponent.
Basically, no cheating.
"We didn't really change anything," said Sidney Crosby, essentially echoing his coach on what just occurred. "We didn't get away from our game or open it up too much. We just stayed solid and generated our chances off that."
It can't get any simpler. Or more solid, to borrow his word.
It started with the captain himself, as most things do in this outfit, owning all 200 feet of ice from the opening shift to another that saw him skate a mind-bending 2:14 straight to the final horn of the first period. He had one cheesy point, an assist on an empty-netter, but it might have been his most overwhelming overall showing of the winter.
"Individually," Sullivan affirmed, "I thought Sid was dominant."
Everywhere, he meant.
And that, indirectly but unmistakably, would spill over into a hat trick for Jake Guentzel ...
... four points for Evgeni Malkin ...
... two goals for Tanner Pearson ...
... and a breathtaking winner for Phil Kessel ...
... bringing a stirring roar from roughly half the 17,434 non-partisans on hand, followed eventually by maybe the most satisfied locker room scene I've covered this season. The plaudits, the pats on the back could be seen and heard all-around. When Crosby's going out of his way to find Garrett Wilson to recognize a beautifully timed and executed blocked shot, when players are answering questions about their plays by raving about someone else's, when Ron Burkle's waiting out in the hall to enthusiastically shake everyone's hand ... one gets the picture.
Rutherford gets the picture, too. In our talk before this game, he was candid as ever in addressing what he feels he needs to achieve by the NHL's Feb. 25 trade deadline.
Meaning not a thing.
"Quite honestly, I don't feel the urgency that I did at this time a year ago," he told me. "If there's something worth doing, I'll do it. And we'll always do our due diligence, spend the next few weeks assessing things. Anytime we can upgrade, if something makes sense, we'll do that."
And what, I asked, might be his primary positional target?
"I wouldn't say we're looking at anything along those lines right now," he replied. "Obviously, we're not going to keep all nine defensemen, so something has to happen there. But we're not looking at anything along the lines of what we need."
He'll have nine defensemen, of course, once Justin Schultz returns. And he's right: The roster can't carry that many, so someone will have to go.
He's also right, I think, that the need -- applying that term in its literal sense -- doesn't exist. Not that I'd mind an additional big-time winger. And certainly not that I'd oppose any exit for Derick Brassard, a pending free agent who continues to be a poor fit. But the need isn't there, not once the roster is at full health. And that's a heck of a thing considering what these Penguins were doing and what this GM was saying just a couple months ago.
The skill was always there. So was the speed, counter to some common mythology. All that was missing was all this alchemy. And even with a championship core at the helm, that wasn't going to just materialize. There had to be a renewed commitment to the Xs and Os, a revived trust in each other and, from there, real results.
As Brian Dumoulin told me: "It's a lot easier to learn and get better when you're winning. This is fun. Losing sucks. Everyone likes learning when you're having fun."
Or this from Guentzel: "It's nice when everything's clicking. That's how you play good hockey. We're just playing good hockey."
No, nothing much to add here.
THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
THREE STARS
My curtain calls go to …
1. Sidney Crosby
Penguins center
It would have been even cooler if he hadn't gotten that assist. Because it would have underscored all the more all that he did.
2. Jake Guentzel
Penguins left winger
A hat trick, seven shots, plus a breakaway that draws a penalty ... sorry, still No. 2 to his center.
3. John Gibson
Ducks goaltender
It's official: Whitehall's own no longer freaks out when facing his childhood favorite team. The mind boggles at how many goals the Penguins could have rung up if he weren't outstanding all night.
THE INJURIES
• Justin Schultz, defenseman, skated loosely on his own Thursday after practice in El Segundo, Calif., and he took to the ice in full gear for the first time after the skate Friday, staying on the rink nearly an hour, along with Casey DeSmith, Juuso Riikola and Chad Ruhwedel. A big, big smile accompanied that, as well.
• Patric Hornqvist, right winger, is out indefinitely with a concussion. He didn't accompany the team on the trip.
• Zach Aston-Reese, right winger, is out indefinitely with a broken left hand. He's on the trip.
THE GOOD
For someone so casually capable of the superb, Crosby seldom deals in the superlative. So, to hear Guentzel relay that Crosby told him after the game that he could never recall partaking in a shift as wild as that 2:14 special late in the first period ... that's something else.
The puck never left the Anaheim end. Only one player on either team succeeded in a change on the fly, Bryan Rust whisking off late in that span for Dominik Simon. Four shots were put on Gibson, three of those exceptional chances, and four others attempted.
One shift.
"With that many Grade-As and that amount of zone time," Guentzel recalled.
Crosby laughed when I brought it up:
In all, the top line accounted for 12 of the Penguins' 36 total shots.
"I thought they had a strong game," Sullivan said. "They're just so hard to defend against underneath the hashmarks. They support each other so well. They hang onto pucks. They protect pucks. They don't throw them away. And they're patient. They wait for their opportunities."
Randy Carlyle, the Ducks' coach, easily summarized it best: "We just followed them around."
THE BAD
That awful shorty came off the stick of Anaheim's Jakub Silfverberg -- always on my short list of the game's most underappreciated players -- but it originated off the stick of Malkin, stripped of the puck at center red by Adam Henrique:
Nowhere to hide from that. He's the last line. Can't happen.
But it did. And the same Malkin who did that was the same one who told me a day earlier in El Segundo that he's been "skating so hard" to try to break out with some big-time scoring, and he's the same one who piled up four points, including the icebreaker that Crosby and others credited with giving the Penguins life.
He'll have more Saturday night against the Kings, I'll bet. The pattern's long been in place that he rises up when facing a fellow Russian he respects, and Los Angeles has Ilya Kovalchuk, a longtime friend.
THE PLAY
Check my Drive to the Net for this one. It's not optional. I'm serious. Page views will be checked and, if they don't match those of this column, everyone's in as much trouble as Carlyle.
THE CALL
Midway through the second period, Guentzel leaped out of the box, was sprung for a breakaway and was hauled down from behind by Anaheim's Josh Manson. At which point referee Justin St-Pierre raised his right arm and ... and ... and ... finally motioned for a tripping minor than a penalty shot.
Which would have been the indisputably correct call:
Guentzel barked back at St-Pierre, and Marcus Pettersson got uncharacteristically animated in doing likewise. But seconds after the ensuing power play, Guentzel buried a shot to make it 3-3, with the primary assist symbolically credited to karma.
Later, St-Pierre vindicated himself with superb positioning to make a goal call even its author, Pearson, hadn't realized was over the line.
"I thought maybe it went in," Pearson would say. "But I didn't want to be that guy who looks stupid raising his arms when he didn't score."
THE OTHER SIDE
I suppose this segment could focus on Daniel Sprong's goal or, for that matter, his overwrought celebration and follow-up glare at the Penguins' bench as he skated by.
But then, if I took that route, I'd feel compelled to delve into Pettersson getting an assist to match Sprong's production point-for-point since the trade at seven each -- Pettersson clanged a shot off the bar, too -- or that Brassard's backcheck on the Sprong goal was almost as criminal as the yawning net he'd miss in the third period:
All that would miss the main storyline from the other perspective, though, that being a franchise-record 10-game losing streak that might cost Carlyle his job. The Ducks last won Dec. 17 at PPG Paints Arena.
Following the game, it got uglier.
An Anaheim reporter asked Carlyle if he was “worried anything could happen to you as a result of this?”
To which the coach shot back: “What do you mean? What are you trying to say? … What do you think? Don’t ask the dumb questions.”
Carlyle also called the reporter "a jerk."
Press conference over. Carlyle's tenure probably soon to follow.
THE SCHEDULE
The Penguins are right back it across town. Faceoff against the Kings at Staples Center is at 10:38 p.m. Pittsburgh time. The home team skates at 1:30 p.m. The visitors won't skate. Sullivan will be available to reporters at 8:30 p.m.
THE COVERAGE
Visit our Penguins team page for everything.
***premium***
