CRANBERRY, Pa. -- "I thought I had him. This time, I was sure."
Marcus Pettersson didn't have Sidney Crosby. No one ever really has him.
Not one-on-one. Not in open ice. Definitely not in this drill on this Monday morning at the Lemieux Sports Complex, the Penguins' first in advance of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
"I reached with my stick around him, right where he had the puck," Pettersson kept telling me, though, honestly, I hadn't asked. "And you think you've got him. But then, the puck comes back between his feet, and you're sure you've got him."
Until ...
"Until he's still got control of it. The puck's down in his feet, and he's still got control of it. Complete control."
And then ...
"He kicks away my stick. He pushes me backward. He turns his shoulders to the right, then takes off to the left."
And bye-bye.
"I didn't have a fun practice."
Pettersson's 22 years old, but he's as savvy as he is playfully self-deprecating. And no, again, I hadn't asked. He'd just stepped off the ice, plopped down at his stall and had yet to unlace the first skate when he opted to share that experience, the one captured above by our Matt Sunday after a long, long 45 minutes of being the main defenseman assigned to Crosby.
He was hardly alone, though. The captain didn't speak a syllable afterward about attaching any particular urgency to this practice. Because he didn't need to. He left it all out on the rink, sprinting at full speed, stopping and spinning with 7-foot snow sprays in his wake and, in his own inimitable way, sending out the strongest of signals as to what time of year it's about to be.
His time.
"It's ridiculous, what he just did out there," Dominik Simon was telling me, referring to Crosby's practice. "You can see how much he wants it. It's just in his blood, you know? It's not like something he needs to achieve. It's just who he is. It's how he was born."
"Guys who get to that level ... they don't need that extra motivation. They're already wired that way," Jack Johnson, Crosby's friend since high school, observed. "Somebody like Sid, who's got three rings, he just sees that as a chance to get four."
I heard that from all over the room. Barely got through citing Crosby's name before it would come.
Justin Schultz took it further, including Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang, the rest of the three-Cup core in saying, "It's all three of them. They want to be the best players in the world. They know you've got to win championships to do that. That's why they've done everything they've done, and they're still hungry for more."
There will be plenty of pre-playoff analysis of this series and potential series beyond, from special teams to systems, goal-scoring depth to goaltending, coach vs. coach, line vs. line, even historical precedent between franchises. And there'll be plenty of merit to all such discussions and much more.
Consider this a friendly reminder that this is where it all starts for this franchise: The core, led by this captain, care so very much about continuing to win.
And consider what Crosby did in this session, quite possibly, a friendly reminder of his own.
"He goes through every game, every practice like it's his last," Pettersson would conclude before finally reaching down for the first lace. "He just pushes forward. He pushes all of us forward. I can't wait to feel what that's like, playing behind him in the biggest games of my life."
• Then there's the two-Cup core, still 11 strong: Crosby, Malkin, Letang, Schultz, Phil Kessel, Matt Murray, Matt Cullen, Brian Dumoulin, Olli Maatta, Bryan Rust ... and this guy:
They've been inconsistent, both last season and this season. Heck, they were inconsistent through large swaths of the back-to-back Cup year. But it undoubtedly bears repeating that this group, under this head coach, is 9-1 in its past 10 playoff series, with the lone loss coming in six games to the eventual champions last spring.
That's a hell of a thing. And I dare say that dwarfs damned near anything witnessed over the span of this past regular season.
As Kessel deftly worded it the other day when I teased that these Penguins have only in the past month begun to look the way everyone had expected all along, "Maaaaaan, you know how it is."
• Dumoulin's listed as having a lower-body injury but, at the risk of betraying that I'm no lower-body-ologist, his skating sure looked fine on this day. Granted, he could soar around the ice if tied to a stretcher, but limitations appeared to be few.
If he misses Game 1, he sure won't be missing Game 2.
• When Dumoulin returns, barring an injury to someone else, I'm sitting Pettersson. And I'm typing that with angst. But he's 22, and the other guys aren't. If Maatta had stumbled at all upon his own return, there might be a debate, but he's been fine.
• In contrast, Zach Aston-Reese won't be bumping anyone. Not at the outset, anyway. It's to the credit of all concerned, but there's no one among the forwards who'd be a smart scratch for a player who's shown in the past that he needs some restart time following an injury. This is playoffs. No time for that. He'll have to kill it in practice.
• Stop with the Simon nonsense already:
Holy cow was Dominik Simon ever good defensively this season. My word. pic.twitter.com/mUJmKBhqgC
— Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) April 8, 2019
That's from Micah McCurdy, a wholly objective advanced data analyst based in Nova Scotia who probably isn't even aware that there are still people in Pittsburgh who still measure forwards solely on goals.
Our city's come a long way with hockey knowledge over the past three decades. Overcoming this obstacle will be the next step of our evolution.
• I've felt for a couple weeks that the Penguins would've been better off opening on the road, and I'll stand by it even though they'll play in what's universally expected to be an electric atmosphere in Nassau Coliseum, the modern-day equivalent of an old minor-league barn.
Three reasons:
1. Let's not pretend PPG Paints Arena wouldn't have been relatively dead for a Game 1 against the Islanders. Home-ice advantage, in that event, likely would have backfired. Because the moment the first thing would go wrong, a defensively tight opponent would have benefited from an impatient setting.
2. Let's not pretend these Penguins don't need wakeup calls to perform to Mike Sullivan's liking. They had 50 points each at home and on the road in the regular season, and both the power play and penalty-killing were better outside Pittsburgh. Those aren't accidents. They focused better.
3. Pittsburgh hockey fans will get at least a peripheral sense -- meaning on TV -- of the playoff atmosphere on Long Island, and I'll bet that ups the ante for Game 3 on Sunday. Even though, with a noon faceoff, that'll require a literal wakeup call.
• The Islanders don't trap. The Islanders aren't passive. There's already been way too much discussion, including in the highest hockey circles, about this opponent as if they're the '95 Devils. They play tight, but they do so in all three zones with equal consistency and competitiveness. Which is a great way to prevent goals.
• I'll offer a series prediction tomorrow, but I'm ready right now to predict a split through the first two. Close games don't take much to tilt the scales, and these games will be close.
National Hockey League• Before closing the book on the 2018-19 NHL regular season, after nearly two decades of criticizing Gary Bettman and the league office for the gradual disappearance of offense from the game, I'll happily offer all the stick taps right here for what's above. The season's average of 6.0 goals per game marked the second-highest scoring season in the past 22 years -- trailing only the 6.2 mark from the post-lockout 2005-06 that came with a bunch of rule changes -- and this was the third year in a row scoring increased, something that hadn't happened since 1979-80.
Best of all, Bettman and his lieutenants pulled it off without any dramatic change to the rules or spirit of the game.
Really well done.
Now, hurry up and get these playoffs going so we can all get right back to bashing Bettman for something else.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins practice, Cranberry, Pa., April 8, 2019 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS