Ivan Provorov, the Flyers' terrific 21-year-old defenseman, was able to rifle off a run of phrases to describe how he and his mates silenced the NHL's No. 1 power play.
"Putting a lot of pressure in the zone, taking away passing lanes, taking away shooting lanes, pressing up ice, not giving them easy entries."
Not bad, kid.
Also not all-the-way accurate.
In fairness, the Penguins would finish 0 for 4 with the extra man, with a measly three shots, in their 5-1 loss in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs Friday night at PPG Paints Arena. That's commendable under any circumstance, much less in the aftermath of conceding a touchdown in the previous meeting.
In further fairness, the Flyers did, in one of those kills, prevent the power play from setting up, even though the formidable first unit of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Phil Kessel, Patric Hornqvist and Justin Schultz had stayed on the ice for nearly the full two minutes.
But it doesn't take Toe Blake or Eddie Johnston to figure out what, above all, went wrong for these guys. Not with Crosby shanking at the lip of the crease in the final three ticks of the second period. It was a precise feed from Kessel and ... and ...
“Yeah, I was … I mean … you can’t hesitate,” Crosby said. “I was in between whether to stop it or one-time it with how much time was left in the period. Still … I mean, you’ve got to find a way to put that in regardless.”
The captain shook his head.
"If I put that in, we're probably not even talking about the power play right now."
Eh. I doubt that. Because while the Crosby shank was representative of what a generally weird, stupid, unfortunate game this was, the power play overall doesn't deserve any such mulligan. Not when seven of the Penguins' remarkably high 13 missed shots came with the extra man. Not when Malkin, in particular, was misfiring so badly and from such severe angles that the puck would go all the way around the boards and all the way out, an old Alexei Kovalev staple for those of you who go back a bit with your hockey. And certainly not when they were facing Brian Elliott, who'd been letting routine shots clang off the pipes throughout the evening.
I asked Schultz, who accounted for two of those seven power-play misses -- though at least his were from longer range -- how much that hurt:
Yeah, that's really it.
Even the Penguins' power play, capable of tic-tac-toe viral gold every time out, needs to put the puck on net. One reason is the obvious, but the other is that a shot that goes wide can either do the Malkin/Kovalev thing, or it'll wind up in a place where the penalty-killers, naturally positioned lower in the zone, can reach it first and clear.
The Flyers were good at the latter, as penalty-killer Sean Couturier stressed, "We were getting 200-foot clears," but that's tantamount to winning an icing competition. The egg before the chicken was the missed shot. By my count, five of the Penguins' seven misses on the power play were immediately followed by a clear.
I don't have much to add here. The point is that the Penguins aren't mismanaging the power play anywhere near as much as simply misfiring. That goes for Game 1, too, when the second unit converted one of those tic-tac-toes, but the first unit had three misses, two off Malkin's blade. They're still gaining the zone with that lone exception, and they're still getting good looks. They just aren't doing anything meaningful with them.
"We missed a couple," Crosby would say. "That's just execution. I wouldn't say we had any big problems on the power play. Just a matter of execution."
Mike Sullivan didn't mention missed shots when asked after Game 2 what went wrong for the power play.
"I think we just forced some plays that weren't there, especially early, and they got some clears because of it," he spoke from the podium. "Instead of taking what the game gave us ... I thought we had opportunities to shoot the puck, and I think we need to shoot the puck more."
More shots is fine. More on target would be better.