Quick: What do Sidney Crosby, Nikita Kucherov, Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Patrick Kane, Johnny Gaudreau, Steven Stamkos and Alexander Barkov have in common?
Too tough?
I'll add a few more, same common category: Phil Kessel, Mitch Marner, John Tavares, Blake Wheeler, Mark Scheifele, Brayden Point, Jonathan Huberdeau, Claude Giroux, Sean Monahan and Jack Eichel?
Still nothing?
OK, I'll lay it out: The first group up there are the eight members of the NHL's top 10 scorers from the regular season who won't be partaking in the second round of Stanley Cup playoffs. And the second group makes up the rest of the NHL's top 25 scorers who won't be partaking, a mindblowing 18 in all.
Eighteen out of 25!
Of those, seven were on teams that didn't even qualify. The rest of the players -- including the two Penguins, obviously -- were eliminated in the first round.
To an extent, that shouldn't surprise in a spring that's already seen both conference's top seeds wiped away -- first time in league history for that -- as well as two other higher-seeded teams. Upsets will have that effect, meaning bouncing some of the best players, or they wouldn't be upsets.
But step back to see the broader scope, not least of which is that Alexander Ovechkin and the defending champions could get bounced tonight, as well, and there just might be something bigger at play.
Throughout hockey history -- no, throughout the history of all major sports -- there tends to be a pendulum effect as it relates to offense and defense. Baseball's had a Dead Ball Era, a Live Ball Era, and it's essentially had both of those more than once. Football's swung from defense winning championships to basketball-type scores to this most recent Super Bowl that saw a single touchdown. Athletes changed, styles changed, rules changed. And then, just when one side thought it had it all figured out, the other side would counter by trying something that hadn't been tried in a long time.
Hockey's anything but an exception. After two mostly miserable decades of Gary Bettman-endorsed defensive duds, the 2018-19 season brought all this ...
... and so much more: The average of 6.0 goals per game was the second-highest of the past 22 years, trailing only the 6.2 in 2005-06 following the lockout and a slew of rule changes. It was the third consecutive season scoring increased, the first time for that since the 1979-80 season. The 138 multiple-goal comeback wins were a league record, and the 551 lead changes were second-most. There were two 50-goal scorers, Ovechkin and Draisaitl, for the first time since Stamkos and Evgeni Malkin in 2011-12.
One gets the idea. But then, so do the people within the game.
Is it any coincidence that the Islanders hire Lou Lamoriello, who never encountered a goal he liked, then Barry Trotz, and magically transformed the league's loosest outfit into its tightest?
How about the way the Blues underwent an even more dramatic transformation with the midseason coaching move that saw Craig Berube have a gifted group go defense-first in front of Jordan Binnington?
Down go the Penguins. Down go the high-flying Jets. Down went the Bolts, too, after scoring more goals -- 325 -- than any team had in a quarter-century, to John Tortorella's Blue Jackets. Down went the Predators to the Stars, whose 202 goals were third-fewest in the league all season.
Yeah, everyone clamps down in the playoffs. But this feels different.
And I can't help but wonder if it won't influence Jim Rutherford in how he reshapes the Penguins this summer and, in turn, Mike Sullivan in how he re-establishes some semblance of team identity.
Let's suppose, for example, they've already had their fill of Phil. And that they determine that Kessel's 82 points, while they'd be difficult to replace, come at too high a cost when it comes to team identity. He's the one player among the team's stars I've pegged as the most likely goner since the final horn of Game 4, and that sure didn't change after Rutherford and Sullivan both stated repeatedly their exasperation with the 2018-19 Penguins' countless inconsistencies.
Maybe they look at Kessel and say, hey, Playoff Phil is awesome, but we just faced an opponent that spent the entire winter forging its playoff identity. And maybe picking and choosing when to flip the switch is part of the problem.
Maybe there's a similar frustration with Malkin and Kris Letang, where those can be brought out with quality coaching and a deft personal touch. Both are certainly at the stage of their careers where their approaches need to mature, to be modified.
But there's no maybe about this: When the GM stands behind a podium and publicly declares that his team "wasn't a team," and when the head coach stands by his side and prioritizes the need to get back to defending hard, that pendulum -- which might or might not be swinging league-wide -- absolutely will in Pittsburgh.
• To repeat, Malkin and Letang aren't going anywhere. I should probably include this as a bullet right through the start of training camp.
• To further repeat, Olli Maatta's most likely to go. He's got a $4,083,333 cap hit each of the next three seasons. He's 24, and he could bring a real hockey return, in addition to the cap relief. And, as much as I respect Maatta and all he's achieved here, his departure won't hurt from the standpoint of making the team younger. It doesn't need to, anyway. Remember, that was the chief concern in moving Daniel Sprong, and Rutherford was able to win the exchange with a 22-year-old defenseman, Marcus Pettersson.
• Clear $10 million in cap space, clone Jared McCann, and pay them all. Problem solved.
• So, uh, wow ... anyone else stay up late Tuesday night into the wee hours of this morning?
If not, maybe the best Game 7 the sport's ever seen took place on San Jose ice with the Sharks overcoming a three-goal deficit in the third period on one, two, three, four goals on the same five-minute power play, followed by the Golden Knights tying late, followed by Barclay Goodrow's winner in OT against Marc-Andre Fleury:
It's @bgoodrow23 with the goal to cap off The Insanity. #StanleyCup pic.twitter.com/79IFV1fVSq
— NHL (@NHL) April 24, 2019
Brilliant. Just brilliant. I'm out of breath as I type this. Hockey fans across the continent will glow about it for years. Everything that's great about the game.
• That said ...
Fans also will talk forever about that five-minute power play and how it was assessed. It came off a third-period faceoff, with the Sharks' Joe Pavelski going down headfirst to the ice for an ugly, bloody injury:
Here is the Cody Eakin five-minute major for cross-checking on #SJSharks captain Joe Pavelski #VGKvsSJS pic.twitter.com/mEGVgzpcOb
— SiriusXM NHL Network Radio (@SiriusXMNHL) April 24, 2019
Pavelski was eventually helped off, so the injury was legit. The call ... it's murky.
Here's how I saw it: Cody Eakin, who was assessed the major for a crosscheck, did crosscheck Pavelski. From there, Pavelski got tangled up with Paul Stastny, then went crashing down. In that moment, there's an act and a result. And in that moment, the referees called it as best they could, without the benefit of replay or hindsight.
The NHL's official explanation from the on-site supervisor Don vanMassenhoven: “The referees called a cross-checking penalty for an infraction that caused a significant injury. In their judgment, the infraction and its result merited a major penalty.”
No one in Nevada will want to hear that, especially after Gerard Gallant later claimed the referees skated to the Vegas bench and explained that Eakin cross-checked Pavelski to the head. Which he clearly didn't. But again, that call's made in that moment.
Anyone who'd like it to be done better would do well to push for major penalties to be reviewable.
• The Golden Knights did some bitter complaining, including a profanity-laced rant by Jonathan Marchessault. Here's an idea: When the other team's given a five-minute major, try to hold them to just a couple goals.
• Three months ago, I called the Sharks the best team in the NHL. I feel more strongly about that than ever.
• Hockey fans in Toronto fancy their franchise as being some marquee thing. It's actually been the NHL's greatest failure over the past half-century. Since the league doubled in size from six to 12 teams in 1967, the year the Penguins were born here, the Maple Leafs have never reached the Stanley Cup Final. They've reached the league's semifinal round -- or conference final, today -- five times, none since 2002.
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) April 24, 2019
Now, with the 5-1 Game 7 loss last night in Boston, their third consecutive Game 7 loss to the Bruins, all the memes live another year.
• Hockey's marquee franchise is based in Montreal. Always has.
• That loss extends another streak, this one beyond belief: The 1993 Canadiens were the last team north of the border to win the Cup, and they're all out again after just one round. Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and Edmonton didn't make it. Winnipeg, Calgary and Toronto are now out. That used to be easily explained in the pre-cap era because the only teams with cash -- Canadiens and Leafs -- were poorly managed, and the rest couldn't make up for the currency difference. Now, it's just plain strange.
• Rutherford's signing of Oula Palve to a one-year, two-way contract isn't a big deal. He's 27, he's 6 feet, 176 pounds, and it took him far too long to climb into the top 10 scorers of Finland's Liiga, as he did the past two seasons. But it's a good move not only for the hope that there might be more -- we all ignored Juuso Riikola's signing last summer, right? -- but also that it bolsters the competitiveness of the roster at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, which missed the Calder Cup playoffs for the first time in 16 years. Have to make up for the thin draft classes somehow.
• A side benefit of these upsets is far more obvious: Places like Dallas, Raleigh and Columbus really needed it. It had been far too long for the first two and, in the case of the third, the Blue Jackets' playoff series victory was their first in 19 years of existence. This is healthy. I covered games in all three cities this season, and Dallas and Raleigh felt as dormant as I could ever recall. Contrast that to the scenes we've all watched over the past week.
Then there's this: The next Winter Classic will be in Texas, at the Cotton Bowl between the Stars and Predators. The pre-sale of 60,000 tickets was the second-biggest in Classic history, all 20,000 remaining tickets put on sale yesterday were swooped up. It might be 82 and humid, but hey, let's hear it for hockey in the Big South.
• Also, let's stop crediting Wayne Gretzky for it. That was preposterous at the time, and it's beyond that now, for as often as Canadian commentators repeat it. The Kings were born in L.A. in 1967, only 20 years before his arrival. The NHL would have added other franchises in the south whether or not Gretzky ever existed. If there's credit to give, it's to the many dedicated, passionate people -- and I've been fortunate to meet a ton -- in Anaheim, Dallas, Tampa, Sunrise, Raleigh, Nashville, even Atlanta ... who've pushed against hard odds to get fans to embrace their respective teams.
Gretzky didn't lift a pinky finger to make any of that happen. He reported for work in L.A., where he was reluctantly traded, and got paid.
• This was a painfully poignant scene before Game 4 at PPG Paints Arena:
Benjamin Hines was a Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps.
He was supposed to return from Afghanistan.
He was supposed to attend Game 4 with his brother.
Instead, he made the ultimate sacrifice.
We honored his legacy and welcomed his brother before Game 4: https://t.co/2dwEt3xmjt pic.twitter.com/aiHQFk0g4Y
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) April 23, 2019
Sure hope it isn't forgotten. Or the Marine himself.