Kovacevic: Penguins' cold, clinical dissection of champs IS the blueprint

TAMPA, Fla. -- I don't know about anyone else, but I came for the Dominik Simon trash talk.

OK, so Dom's maybe the solar system's most soft-spoken soul and, thus, capable of no such thing. But on this NHL-opening Tuesday night inside Amalie Arena that saw an ESPN viewership and the whole hockey world focus on the two most recent back-to-back Stanley Cup champions, I'll be damned if I let it get overlooked that, after the Penguins lit up the Lightning, 6-2, Dom spoke in his press conference: "I don’t think they liked our forecheck too much."

Oh, and also, Dom had a press conference.

Oh, and also, Dom scored a goal.

Oh, and also, Dom's now this dude forever ...

... at least in my loving lens.

But no, seriously, this was it. All of it. This was precisely how every split-second of the Penguins' 54th opener needed to go, and, at the risk of treading onto told-ya-so territory ... well, I did. And I could copy and paste yesterday's column right here, or simply summarize it: This team can still compete. It can still contend. But it'll require what was witnessed here. All of it. The 200-foot, that-puck-is-ours approach that elegantly straddles aggressiveness and caution. The approach that demands full participation, because even a single passenger brings it down. Meaning everyone. Doing everything.

This was clinical. Close to perfection.

"Well, it's a big win for us," Mike Sullivan would observe, his broad smile upon entering the media room betraying the cool he'd display next. "I thought we came out with a lot of energy. I thought we played the game that we're trying to play. We were doing everything in fives in all three zones, and that's when our team is at its best. Our best defense takes place 150, 160 feet away from our net, with our puck-pursuit game. And I thought our guys did a real good job."

Want to know what he really thought?

This was from the same man hours earlier, after the morning skate: "We're going to have to make sure that we play collectively as a group. We've got to be hard to play against. We've got to force teams to play goal-line-to-goal-line. And for me, I think if we do that, we've got enough in our lineup to be competitive. We can beat any team in this league."

This lineup, he meant. The one missing a vital quarter of the roster, with Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel and Zach Aston-Reese watching from the press box, with Evgeni Malkin back home, and with Mike Matheson aggravating a lower-body injury at this skate.

And Sullivan wasn't alone in expressing such confidence at the skate, with Kris Letang, the only active Core member saying, "I think guys are excited. Most of the time, when a challenge is put in front of us, we’ve reacted well."

It's not like they didn't know who they were facing. It's not like they didn't know what they were facing in terms of atmosphere and audience.

Nope, it's just that they believed more, very plainly, in how they're going about things.

I know, I know, I never shut up about Sullivan's system. It's true. But that's because I became a believer in San Jose, had that fortified in Nashville, then saw it succeed time and time again ... when it's been wholeheartedly applied. Meaning everyone. Doing everything.

I could flick a dart at any slice of the full 60-minute film of this game and come up with a hat trick of wholeheartedly applied examples, and here, as evidence, are three in rapid succession from the third period:

We start with Dom, of course.

Anthony Cirelli does well to take the puck from him deep in the Tampa Bay zone and, as a bonus, takes a couple authoritative strides to try to pull away. Which, normally, he'd have done. Not pictured but known by me is that Dom was near the end of a full shift. So he might've been forgiven if he were too gassed to get back or even if he'd tried to change on the fly.

Instead, he did what's seen up there. He let Cirelli know he'd be there with him step for step, and then, seeing Letang step up at the Pittsburgh blue line, he began to slide toward a passing alley ... and intercepted it like the trash-talking NFL defensive back we all now know him to be.

This one's even better:

That's Kasperi Kapanen, he who once was benched by Sullivan, showing that being the fastest player on the rink doesn't always have to mean producing any points. In fact, he and linemate Jason Zucker would wind up the only forwards without one.

Not pictured but known by me was that this was a nothing play. Hopeless. At least to the naked eye, it looked like Kapanen had hit warp speed for no reason. Ryan McDonagh was miles ahead of him, and he proved that he felt that way, as well, by whirling around right toward Kapanen without a care. But Kapanen still, somehow, arrives in time to tap McDonagh's shaft with his blade, just enough to force a turnover to Evan Rodrigues.

Kapanen is, as one of the absent players told me after seeing that sequence, "just so locked in."

This one's from the same shift. It's boring but maybe most relevant:

Brayden Point's looking toward the slot, but Letang's got him covered. Really covered. And he doesn't need help. But the Sullivan system calls for multiple sticks in such situations, and it's a drill he'll play as much as any other in practices, loudly urging players to seize any sign of weakness and get in there to help.

Teddy Blueger gets in there to help. The visitors calmly touch the puck twice more to exit the zone.

I think I'll push pause on this portion of the column. No need to take it too far. This is how it's supposed to work, this entire evening. And the Penguins have the people to make it work.

But then, that's never been the problem, has it?

I asked Sullivan, while recognizing that an extraordinary effort is, in fact, extraordinary, what it'll take to make this last through 82 games plus playoffs, regardless who's in or out of the lineup:

"We talk a lot about our identity and, in my tenure here, that's how we like to play," he replied. "We have to be in good shape. And we tried to do certain things over training camp to prepare these guys for a certain type of game. We try to utilize our bench as best we can so that we can spread minutes around. But I think the guys embrace it. I think they like the game that we're trying to play. And I also think it plays to our strengths."

Questions, anyone?

• There's a reason the above photo, by Getty's Andrew Berkshaw, was chosen to top our site. Covers it all.

• In covering it all, no, I won't omit Tristan Jarry stopping 26 of 28 shots and giving up both goals, really, after there was a three-goal lead. He was both athletic and composed, moving well laterally but seldom too much.

And he wasn't an exception to that wave of confidence. From above, I noticed him frequently gesturing demonstratively and/or appreciatively toward teammates. On a second-period penalty-kill, he did so during play: Mark Friedman had wrapped around a hard clear on the forehand up the left glass -- that's not easy -- and, as Friedman began to head back to the bench, Jarry momentarily chased after him to offer a pat on the rump.

I asked Jarry about that, and he smiled.

"It's awesome," he replied. "They're playing hard, and it makes my job easy. They did a great job for me."

Long, long way to go. But picture how it'd feel if this had been little more than a continuation of Game 6.

The captain's a smart one:

• It's nice that Brian Boyle scored on the day he signed a contract following his tryout as a 36-year-old who hadn't been in the NHL for nearly two years. It's nicer still that it came via veteran patience, depositing one through Andrei Vasilevskiy's five-hole rather than trying to outscale a giant.

But nothing there beat Sam Lafferty's saucer:

Never lets you quit on him, does he?

He's got the size, he's got the speed, he's got the youth, he's got the energy, and he's got more skill than most seem to realize. There just needs to be a convergence of all that.

• The Bolts were bad. I saw it, too. But that didn't excuse Jon Cooper's postgame remarks, which I found childish if not outright disrespectful.

After Cooper had fairly dismissed the impact of his team taking part in the banner-raising ceremony before faceoff, something Sullivan himself had acknowledged in the morning can take an emotional toll in addition to leaving guys standing around for a half-hour, he added, "We were stuck in the mud all night. No excuses. It wasn’t that we waited. The other team had to wait, too."

Yep. 

But then, Cooper, when I asked his view of the Penguins' part in the outcome, replied, "It doesn't matter, if you have skill and all this stuff, if you don't work. Compete level beats you every time. It's been a trademark of ours to have the skill and the work ethic, and it just wasn't there tonight."

Maybe detecting, as I did, that there wasn't exactly a tap of the stick in there, a Tampa reporter followed up with a similar question, to which Cooper replied, "We had nothing all night. We could have played Pittsburgh's farm team tonight, and we might have seen the same result."

Bulletin-board fodder in Wilkes-Barre, baby!

But no, really, Steven Stamkos, the classy captain, had this: "They had a depleted lineup with some really good players missing and they worked extremely hard tonight. They stuck to their structure and outworked us. We were chasing the puck all night."

• What the hell was Cooper doing with his net empty for nearly six minutes?

And letting the Penguins become the NHL's first team since 1983 to score three empty-netters?

That's clown show all the way.

Almost as bad as his line afterward: 'We did nothing before that. I probably should've done it sooner."

• What a night to be Ron Hextall, huh?

The goals came from Boyle, then Danton Heinen courtesy of Jeff Carter ...

... then Simon with the eventual winner ...

... and they're all either his acquisitions or reacquisitions.

Which is to say nothing of Mark Friedman, who, filling in for Matheson, might've been the best player on either side over the first period and a half. Either the puck was following him around, or vice versa, and he was dogged defensively, too, moving Sullivan to call it "the best game he's played with us."

• More Dom, by popular demand:

• No, I have no idea what ESPN did on its broadcast, though I certainly detected enough distaste for it. Being blunt, I'm not invested. I'm just not a TV guy. If I'm watching sports on TV and I don't like what I'm seeing/hearing, I'll turn it off and follow a different way or, if it's just the announcers, I'll hit mute.

This game, I'd think, would've been an infinitely bigger deal back home than anything in the booth. Maybe I'm wrong.

• The Panthers are next, Thursday night across Alligator Alley. Just as tall a task.

• If I'm Sullivan, I'm not changing a thing. Not the goaltender. Not any of the players trying to work their way back. Can't do it.