• "We needed this," Noel Acciari was telling me in a hushed tone that seemed to speak more to relief than satisfaction. "No question, we needed this one."
He couldn't have been more correct.
Had these Penguins not battled all the way back to beat the Bruins, 5-4, on Tommy Novak's burial 17 seconds into overtime on this Sunday evening at PPG Paints Arena, they'd have been embarking on a five-game, cross-continent, all-contending-opponents trip on a four-game slide, with their Stanley Cup playoff spot in peril, without a sense for Sidney Crosby's status, with Evgeni Malkin still suspended, and ... yeah.
"We know what's coming up with the trip and everything, no Sid, no Geno," Acciari'd proceed. "We knew what this one meant."
I asked Erik Karlsson, as well, about how much this was needed:
"A lot," he'd reply. "We gave ourselves a chance, all the way from the start. They obviously go up 3-0 on us, but we had a good push. It felt like we played a good game against an opponent that's been giving us a lot of troubles. But you know, overall, I think that for 61 minutes, 62 minutes, whatever, we were good enough and we deserved to win."
And, again, needed to:
NHL
Top three in the division make it. Top eight in the conference.
But hey, why fuss over all that, anyway?
Instead, let's talk less about need-to and a lot more about want-to. Because I'll be damned if the latter wasn't a much, much larger factor, right to the riveting conclusion:
That scene up there, my friends, is all about want-to.
Novak's cleaned on the overtime's opening faceoff by Pavel Zacha, whose regulation hat trick -- not to mention a 3-0 lead -- somehow weren't enough for the Bruins, one of the NHL's stingier operations. What's worse, the puck's pulled back to Charlie McAvoy, among the league's preeminent mobile defenseman. Which should've guaranteed Boston extended possession with all that three-on-three ice.
Nope.
Because Chinakhov terrorizes him. He turns McAvoy once, then twice, then forces a flub, then picks off a pass intended for David Pastrnak.
The puck pops out to Karlsson, the Penguins' best player by a broad margin of late, and he'd dish back to his left for Chinakhov, now circling for more. Pastrnak tries to keep up, but he runs hard into Karlsson -- or Karlsson runs into him, depending on the perspective -- and Chinakhov's able to swoop atop the Boston crease.
Marco Sturm, the Bruins' coach, never mentioned a possible interference call there, but Pastrnak did, saying, "It's man-on-man there. And obviously, the guy I didn't cover stepped into my lane and, to me, it's interference, but it's not a penalty. ... It cost us a point, unfortunately."
Eh, no.
Purely from the Boston perspective, McAvoy getting hunted down like a wounded animal cost the point. Pastrnak losing a battle and his man cost the point. Pastrnak simply standing upright and watching all the rest cost the point.
To Pastrnak's credit, he'd add, "But we won the faceoff, so we shouldn't even be in that position. And we were leading the game, 3-0."
I digress back to the Pittsburgh perspective, which saw Novak pounce on all of Chinakhov's dynamism to that point and send the already spirited crowd of 18,028 sky-high.
"It was just kind of a lot of chaos, honestly," was Novak's assessment. "Good little pick from Karl there, and the puck kind of just popped to me. Right place, right time, just kind of an open net."
It wasn't just that goal, though. There was a palpable commitment in place from the drop of the puck to avoid embarking on this trip lugging a four-game losing streak, and that applied even after Arturs Silovs' ghastly giveaway to Pastrnak that handed the Bruins a 3-0 lead.
It wasn't a handful of 'em, either. It wasn't a leader or veteran or two. It was everyone.
And it apparently wasn't an accident.
Chinakhov's five-on-three goal late in the second made it 3-1, but a penalty in the final few ticks meant Boston would begin the third not only with the two-goal lead but also a power play.
“We came in here between the second and third, and we just knew it was going to feel good," Mantha recalled. "We said it in here. The guys had a big kill to start the third period. Everyone played really well in the third.”
Relentlessly so:
Good stuff, huh?
The Penguins wound up with edges of 39-26 in shots, 75-54 in shot attempts and -- sit down for this -- they even split the faceoffs at 29 apiece. And within that, the fourth line of Acciari, Blake Lizotte and Connor Dewar were outright dominant -- 23 of 32 shot attempts at five-on-five while they were out there -- and Dewar scored on a crazy backhand chop shot that he and Geno'd been messing with in practice. Mantha, who'd expressed afterward his joy at not being traded from this airtight group, revved up his motor toward two tying goals in the third, the first sprung on a crisp head-man from Novak. Silovs flipped his script from goat to GOAT, stopping everything after his error, including a couple beauties late in regulation. The Sam Girard trade finally paid dividends with by far his strongest showing, having been reunited with former Avalanche teammate Ilya Solovyov.
The list runs a lot longer than that, even without my mentioning Acciari's one ... two ... three nearly suicidal runs up ice, one of which saw him crash loudly into the end boards. (He told me he's fine but that, "Yeah, I felt that one.")
One gets the point.
They needed it, but they wanted it all the more. And the want part ... let's not be underestimating that with these guys. They've wanted all of this from the Garden onward.
• Thanks for reading my hockey coverage. Next stop: Lots of 'em. Taylor Haase and I'll double-cover the eight-day trip through Raleigh, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, then Raleigh again.
THE ASYLUM
Grind: Where there's a want-to, there's a way
Good Monday morning!
• "We needed this," Noel Acciari was telling me in a hushed tone that seemed to speak more to relief than satisfaction. "No question, we needed this one."
He couldn't have been more correct.
Had these Penguins not battled all the way back to beat the Bruins, 5-4, on Tommy Novak's burial 17 seconds into overtime on this Sunday evening at PPG Paints Arena, they'd have been embarking on a five-game, cross-continent, all-contending-opponents trip on a four-game slide, with their Stanley Cup playoff spot in peril, without a sense for Sidney Crosby's status, with Evgeni Malkin still suspended, and ... yeah.
"We know what's coming up with the trip and everything, no Sid, no Geno," Acciari'd proceed. "We knew what this one meant."
I asked Erik Karlsson, as well, about how much this was needed:
"A lot," he'd reply. "We gave ourselves a chance, all the way from the start. They obviously go up 3-0 on us, but we had a good push. It felt like we played a good game against an opponent that's been giving us a lot of troubles. But you know, overall, I think that for 61 minutes, 62 minutes, whatever, we were good enough and we deserved to win."
And, again, needed to:
NHL
Top three in the division make it. Top eight in the conference.
But hey, why fuss over all that, anyway?
Instead, let's talk less about need-to and a lot more about want-to. Because I'll be damned if the latter wasn't a much, much larger factor, right to the riveting conclusion:
That scene up there, my friends, is all about want-to.
Novak's cleaned on the overtime's opening faceoff by Pavel Zacha, whose regulation hat trick -- not to mention a 3-0 lead -- somehow weren't enough for the Bruins, one of the NHL's stingier operations. What's worse, the puck's pulled back to Charlie McAvoy, among the league's preeminent mobile defenseman. Which should've guaranteed Boston extended possession with all that three-on-three ice.
Nope.
Because Chinakhov terrorizes him. He turns McAvoy once, then twice, then forces a flub, then picks off a pass intended for David Pastrnak.
The puck pops out to Karlsson, the Penguins' best player by a broad margin of late, and he'd dish back to his left for Chinakhov, now circling for more. Pastrnak tries to keep up, but he runs hard into Karlsson -- or Karlsson runs into him, depending on the perspective -- and Chinakhov's able to swoop atop the Boston crease.
Marco Sturm, the Bruins' coach, never mentioned a possible interference call there, but Pastrnak did, saying, "It's man-on-man there. And obviously, the guy I didn't cover stepped into my lane and, to me, it's interference, but it's not a penalty. ... It cost us a point, unfortunately."
Eh, no.
Purely from the Boston perspective, McAvoy getting hunted down like a wounded animal cost the point. Pastrnak losing a battle and his man cost the point. Pastrnak simply standing upright and watching all the rest cost the point.
To Pastrnak's credit, he'd add, "But we won the faceoff, so we shouldn't even be in that position. And we were leading the game, 3-0."
I digress back to the Pittsburgh perspective, which saw Novak pounce on all of Chinakhov's dynamism to that point and send the already spirited crowd of 18,028 sky-high.
"It was just kind of a lot of chaos, honestly," was Novak's assessment. "Good little pick from Karl there, and the puck kind of just popped to me. Right place, right time, just kind of an open net."
It wasn't just that goal, though. There was a palpable commitment in place from the drop of the puck to avoid embarking on this trip lugging a four-game losing streak, and that applied even after Arturs Silovs' ghastly giveaway to Pastrnak that handed the Bruins a 3-0 lead.
It wasn't a handful of 'em, either. It wasn't a leader or veteran or two. It was everyone.
And it apparently wasn't an accident.
Chinakhov's five-on-three goal late in the second made it 3-1, but a penalty in the final few ticks meant Boston would begin the third not only with the two-goal lead but also a power play.
“We came in here between the second and third, and we just knew it was going to feel good," Mantha recalled. "We said it in here. The guys had a big kill to start the third period. Everyone played really well in the third.”
Relentlessly so:
Good stuff, huh?
The Penguins wound up with edges of 39-26 in shots, 75-54 in shot attempts and -- sit down for this -- they even split the faceoffs at 29 apiece. And within that, the fourth line of Acciari, Blake Lizotte and Connor Dewar were outright dominant -- 23 of 32 shot attempts at five-on-five while they were out there -- and Dewar scored on a crazy backhand chop shot that he and Geno'd been messing with in practice. Mantha, who'd expressed afterward his joy at not being traded from this airtight group, revved up his motor toward two tying goals in the third, the first sprung on a crisp head-man from Novak. Silovs flipped his script from goat to GOAT, stopping everything after his error, including a couple beauties late in regulation. The Sam Girard trade finally paid dividends with by far his strongest showing, having been reunited with former Avalanche teammate Ilya Solovyov.
The list runs a lot longer than that, even without my mentioning Acciari's one ... two ... three nearly suicidal runs up ice, one of which saw him crash loudly into the end boards. (He told me he's fine but that, "Yeah, I felt that one.")
One gets the point.
They needed it, but they wanted it all the more. And the want part ... let's not be underestimating that with these guys. They've wanted all of this from the Garden onward.
• Thanks for reading my hockey coverage. Next stop: Lots of 'em. Taylor Haase and I'll double-cover the eight-day trip through Raleigh, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, then Raleigh again.
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