Sidney Crosby reaches for a rebound around the Flyers' Brian Elliott Tuesday night in Philadelphia. - GETTY

DK'S GRIND

Kovacevic: Honestly, Penguins might be wise to file this one away

Jan 22, 2020 • 6:20 pm

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PHILADELPHIA -- The eyes would strongly suggest the Penguins were exhausted to the extreme.

The ears ... well, Mike Sullivan's ears, anyway, suggested otherwise. By fuming figurative smoke from either side.

"No," he'd bite back when asked whether fatigue might be a fair excuse for his team getting flat-lined, 3-0, by the Flyers on this Tuesday night at Wells Fargo Center. "Nor should it be. We just weren’t very good."

Too much east-west, maybe? Not enough dumping deep?

"There wasn’t anything," he'd bite right back again. "For me, it was a lack of executing, lack of attention to detail, no sense of urgency, no cooperative play. Can’t play that way in this league and expect to win."

OK, so next, I tried a technical route. That tends to click with him, even after a tough loss.

Nope:

Hey, all a guy can do is try.

"There's nothing positive that I can draw from this game," the man spoke there at the end. "It's disappointing."

It was. He's right.

He might be wrong in dismissing fatigue as a factor -- several players acknowledged to me that it was, 11 games in 20 days makes for a hell of an argument, and Dave Molinari's got much more on that topic -- but he might even have been right to take that approach.

Because, you know, part of me wondered even as this awful evening was unfolding down at ice level if this wasn't the best thing that could conceivably happen to this group at this particular point in the schedule.

Dead serious. Hear me out.

See, the NHL's standings heading into this All-Star week/bye combo that'll bring the Penguins a nine-day break, now show them fourth overall in the league at 31-14-5. And what a meaty sandwich that makes, too, a point back of the defending Stanley Cup champion Blues and four points up on the playoff-vanquishing Islanders. Even the No. 1 Capitals are just a couple wins away.

Heady stuff. Certainly beyond what anyone could've expected entering this season, never mind the 209 man-games lost to injury.

But here's the bluntest of brutal truths: This roster, as currently constituted, isn't the fourth-best in the league.

Sorry, but it just isn't. And it hasn't been that at any stage of the season. A big part of that's the injuries, but the other parts are that the scoring depth isn't a match for the league's upper crust, the power play's never found any footing, the individual defensive pedigree isn't exactly innate, and Matt Murray had mostly struggled until the past two weeks.

That's hardly some autopilot juggernaut.

No, the principal reason this team's reached this height is that it's blossomed into something more than the sum of its parts. By buying into Sullivan's system. By its stars leading through example. By performing so soundly within a structure that it's become less of a process and more about instinct. And above all, by relentlessly, often maniacally, outworking opponents.

None of that happened here.

I could cite nothing more than that they faced Brian Elliott, arguably the league's worst fully employed goaltender, and peppered him with all of 19 pucks. Three in the third period. None in the final 10 minutes.

But I'll additionally show both of the Philadelphia non-empty-net goals, since they better underscore this discussion:

That's first and foremost a prodigious piece of hockey by Jakub Voracek. Notice that he both starts and finishes the sequence, initially by tracking way back in the neutral zone to intercept Patric Hornqvist's breakout, then by bolting right by everyone before beating Tristan Jarry on the backhand.

"An elite talent making an elite play" was how his coach, Alain Vigneault, would lay it out.

But back to the other perspective: Hornqvist goes up the boards because neither Sidney Crosby nor Dominik Simon presented him a realistic target. Maybe Jake Guentzel goes tape-to-tape through traffic, but not Hornqvist. From there, Jack Johnson is too passive allowing Sean Couturier to cut to the middle, and Chad Ruhwedel basically draws a blank in apparently thinking a backpedaling Hornqvist would pick up Voracek.

The other came against three of the same skaters, substituting only Crosby for Jared McCann, and John Marino for Ruhwedel:

Yet again it's first and foremost fine hockey by one of the Flyers, with James van Riemsdyk, like Voracek, both starting and finishing. In this case, he hotly pursues Marino trying to skate the puck out of the Pittsburgh end and pokes just enough for possession to be lost.

I asked the kid what happened.

"He got me," Marino would say of JVR. "Got a piece of me, and that was it."

He's so smart, and he's been so good. An unearthed treasure, really. He'll learn from it.

I asked JVR about the play, too.

"You just have to keep skating hard," he replied. "Sometimes, when you're playing well defensively, it can look like it's not a fast game. Trust me, it's a fast game out there. You have just to keep moving."

Sound familiar?

The rest went little better: Johnson curiously dropped to one knee to try in vain to cut off Travis Konecny's return pass, and JVR deftly redirected.

So whether the Penguins were tired or a bit too happy with themselves for the mega-rally past the Bruins -- one player suggested that to me -- or they simply forgot for one unfortunate night who they were and how they got here ... yeah, I'd argue the coming nine days will be worth a lot more now than they might've been.

• One good thing actually did take place, though Sullivan's to be forgiven for forgetting: The Penguins killed off 3:47 of continuous Philadelphia power plays in the second period and, within that, Zach Aston-Reese did some of the best PK of his life at all points on the rink. He's matured so much in that regard.

• Jarry was OK, too. And it was smart of Sullivan to start him. Giving Murray three straight starts going into a long break would've been a bad idea all-around, not least of which is that could've felt like he was discarding the NHL's top statistical goaltender at the first chance.

• Andrew Agozzino clanged one off the pipe, as did shots by Crosby and Marcus Pettersson. And Bryan Rust did have that golden chance he planted right into Elliott's logo. At the same time, I never felt this pendulum was in danger of swinging. The Flyers were doing everything the Penguins normally do, and there's no switch to flip that.

• I asked Elliott how his fellow Flyers performed in front of him, and he gave a fascinating answer: “Our guys did a great job of getting in lanes. If they’re skating around and they don’t see openings, and we’re boxing guys out -- they like to cross-box a lot in the offensive zone -- I thought we had good sticks, good positioning, and we didn’t chase around too much.”

He's painfully right. It'd be silly to suggest Vigneault cracked some code, but the Penguins time and again crossed the Philadelphia blue line, telegraphed an intent to pass and found not a single target available.

• More from Elliott, who, like others in his room, openly acknowledged that their archrivals weren't in peak form: "It’s the battle of Pennsylvania here, so it means that much more. We all know that. They’ll be going again when we come back after the break against them, and we’ve got to be ready. That’s what makes hockey so fun."

That's Jan. 30 at PPG Paints Arena. Biggest break within a home-and-home series maybe ever.

• Anyone else get the annoying feeling this will be the first-round matchup?

• Couple questions I had for Teddy Blueger:

• Justin Schultz and Nick Bjugstad were skating back home, and Sullivan said he expects Schultz will return with the first game back. And though this never came up with the coach, that'll obviously mean Ruhwedel comes out. Righty for a righty.

Don't weep for Ruhwedel, though. When Jim Rutherford signed him to a one year, $700,000 contract last summer, it was mutually understood this would be his role. He could play no games, all 82 or anywhere in between, but he'd do so professionally and without complaint. That's who he is, anyway, so it's a perfect fit.

All Ruhwedel's delivered these past 27 games, the above strange sequence aside, was six points, a plus-3 rating and an eminently reliable replacement.

Until next time.

• I'll take one thing above all at this break: Sam Lafferty, sent down to Wilkes-Barre right after the game along with Agozzino, Joe Blandisi and Kevin Czuczman, needs to score a few and return soon with the same swagger we saw back in October. That version of Lafferty looked like it'd be a huge help to this group, and I'm still not convinced he won't be.

• The Flyers haven't won anything meaningful since 1975, of course, but don't let that mask that they've surpassed everyone at the mascot thing: