Dan Marino, Barry Sanders, Randy Moss, Jim Kelly, Dick Butkus ... never won it all in the NFL. Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, Ken Griffey Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ralph Kiner ... never won it all in Major League Baseball. Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Allen Iverson, Patrick Ewing ... never won it all in the NBA.
And in the NHL, the league that'll once again take a springtime center stage in our city Saturday night with Game 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs between the Penguins and Flyers, this unfortunate category can count the legitimately great Marcel Dionne, Jarome Iginla, Henrik Lundqvist, Dale Hawerchuk, Gilbert Perreault, Mike Gartner, Pavel Bure, Adam Oates, Mats Sundin, Norm Ullman and so many more who've hung up the skates without the hoisting.
Erik Karlsson's got no interest in being labeled any such way.
Never has, actually.
At the same time, while he's been awarded the Norris Trophy three times, while he's put up 936 points to push up to 12th on the NHL's all-time list for defensemen, while he's blurred past so many of the game's most iconic figures -- I had to inform him myself in Salt Lake City a month ago that he'd passed, oh, you know, just Bobby Orr -- and while he's cemented himself as a first-ballot Hall of Famer in his own right ... Karlsson not only hasn't won the Cup, he hasn't even reached a Final.
"Close, though. Twice," as he'd remind me in a good talk we had at his stall following practice Thursday at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex. "And we should've had it in 2019."
Everyone in these parts will recall how his 2017 run ended with the Senators in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference final against you-know-who:
Like yesterday, huh?
For him, too.
"I mean, it's been brutal for me playing against those guys over the course of my career. I never had any real success," Karlsson would say with a small smile, recalling this elimination and a second-round one in 2013. "So it'll be nice to have them on my side."
The 2019 elimination, while in San Jose, saw the favored Sharks lose to the Blues in six games of the Western Conference final.
"If we were healthy, I think we win everything," he'd recall of injury losses to critical players like Joe Pavelski, Tomas Hertl and, yeah, Joe Thornton, another of those names that probably belongs on those lists up there. "That one hurt a lot. You could feel that one."
At least he could feel it. What'd follow was a whole lot of hollow. No more playoffs in San Jose. And even after being traded to Pittsburgh in August of 2023, a choice he had to approve via the no-trade clause in his contract, principally because he hoped to chase a championship alongside his prior tormentors, there'd be no playoffs here, either.
Until now.
"Obviously, this is why I came here to begin with," he'd say. "I believe in this group. From an outside perspective, and being here now for three years, the potential's always been there."
____________________
I can't be certain how he knew that, but I'll vouch for his sincerity.
Upon his arrival almost three years ago, as he'd eventually share with me, he'd been most nervous about meeting Kris Letang. Not Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, the resident icons, but the third and least heralded member of the franchise's fabled Core. The reason was that he knew he'd be, to some degree, chewing up some of Letang's long-standing role as No. 1 defenseman, notably on the power play. And, as had happened similarly in San Jose with Brent Burns, he hoped to make it clear that a roster really could house two No. 1s.
So a week before training camp, he found Letang where he’s easily found, the fitness room, introduced himself and worked out with him all that morning. Then the next morning. Then the next morning.
It was speaking Letang's language without having to learn a lick of French.
"He's been such a professional," Letang would tell me at the time. "I can't say enough."
I was impressed. But I wasn't fully wowed by this facet until a few weeks later following an overtime loss in Philadelphia. He'd been quietly complaining to me about some stuff that'd gone awry that night. Not about anyone or anything super-specific, mind you, just a general venting. And, as I'd begun to respond, he then chose to raise his voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room: "BUT NO, THAT MAKES TOO MUCH SENSE, DOESN'T IT?"
Pure silence.
I still have no idea what he meant, but the message was sent to those who mattered.
The more he was around, the more frustrated he became, in particular with Mike Sullivan. And that made sense to me. Karlsson's entire hockey career, beginning with his childhood in tiny Landsbro, Sweden, was founded on the freedom to create. He'd grown up idolizing Peter Forsberg, Nicklas Lidstrom, Daniel Alfredsson, Sundin and other Swedish stars, and he'd been allowed by that nation's advanced developmental system to be his best self, mistakes and all, through the junior ranks. He could fly, and no one wanted to ground him:
Sullivan, who'd profess that he'd "never want to take our great players' sticks out of their hands," didn't necessarily want to ground him, either. But he'd always held his defensemen here to a different standard to adhere to his system. They couldn't leave their lanes. They couldn't do this or that without proper cover. They couldn't try passes across the vertical middle. And when that checklist began being imposed upon Karlsson, he predictably bit back.
Dan Muse took a different approach, one that also could've been seen when, on the opening day of camp this past September, he dictated his first power-play drills with these five players: Sid, Geno, Karlsson, Bryan Rust and Rickard Rakell.
Same five he sent out in this practice on this day. Same five who'd proceed to push the Penguins back near the top of the NHL's power-play rankings. Same five who'd grasp right away that Muse expected his best players to be his best players, and that they wouldn’t be his best players if he held them back.
Karlsson found love at first sight.
"All he wants is for you to be the best that you can be at what you do," he'd tell me of Muse, essentially echoing everyone else in the room on this subject all season. "He tells us the expectations that he has of us, and it's up to us to meet those expectations."
Rakell, Karlsson's best bud in the room, took that further.
"When you have someone like Karl, someone who can change a game, who can do all the things he does, you let him do that," Rakell would tell me. "Everyone sees now, especially in Pittsburgh, who he is and what makes him so great."
Now, yeah. But the first two seasons, both under Sullivan, saw scoring outputs of 56 and 53 points, or roughly half of the 101 he had in San Jose the previous season in winning the Norris again. The 2024-25 season also saw a minus-24 rating to go with the first sluggish skating of his life, visible enough that it'd become common in the press box to hear Kyle Dubas, the GM who'd acquired him, barking from the back, 'C'MON KARL! SKATE!'
No more, it's safe to say.
It didn't get a ton of attention, but Karlsson was just named team MVP for the season, the first non-Sid player to get that in six years. And good luck finding anyone to disagree.
"He carried us. He got us here," Anthony Mantha, he of the team-leading 33 goals, was telling me on this day. "Look, I'm aware of what everyone in here does and how it takes all of us to make it happen. But what he did these past few weeks ..."
He didn't need to finish. We all saw it:
That's Connor Hellebuyck up there, kids. That's no joke.
And neither was Kevin Hayes joking when he recently called Karlsson "the best player in the NHL" post-Olympic break, with Karlsson running up 11 goals and 20 assists in 24 games to rank first among defensemen and 11th among all skaters, all while logging 24:31 of ice time and commanding both the power play and penalty-kill from the back end.
Needless to say, Dubas hasn't been quite as audible these days.
When Karlsson was hit with a lower-body injury in January, he returned well ahead of schedule for a game in, of all places, Edmonton, which some defensemen, especially one slowed in the legs, might welcome skipping given the extra challenge of staring down Connor McDavid between the blue lines.
"He could've waited," Dubas would say earlier this week, referring to a spate of free days the Penguins had after that. "Instead, he worked to get back into that game."
And once the Olympics were over, and the Penguins knew they'd be without Sid, only to soon lose Geno and others, Dubas recalled: "When you're in our room, everyone looks to Sid for everything. But with Sid out, that gave Erik a chance to be at his best in terms of leadership. You know, put a little more of the onus and responsibility on himself. And that's where it all really started to come together."
As in, all of it.
"The whole year, he'd been really good defensively. The coaches trusted him on the penalty-kill. They really put him into a spot to take different steps, and his skating's always been so great, the puck movement ... but this year, it's been the defending."
No doubt. His game's been built from the back out, as much as I've ever seen it. He's been magical with the puck in large part because he's been the one seizing it.
"It's been great to see him play at this level, especially at this age," Dubas continued, referring to Karlsson being 35. "It just leads you to think there's a lot more left in the tank for him. And the guys now, they want to try to help win FOR him. Because he's one of those guys who hasn't gotten to the finish line in the playoffs."
Brief pause.
"Yet."
____________________
No one can know what's ahead, even immediately. I see the Penguins as a superior overall team to a significant chunk of this playoff field, while also acknowledging that, the deeper they'd go, their skaters might have to be superior to an exaggerated extreme to overcome the .851-save-percentage goaltending that's been gotten from Stuart Skinner and Arturs Silovs the past few weeks.
Maybe it's there. They're as healthy as they've been in some time. They're fast. They've got the youth to feel fresh enough. They're skilled. They're smart.
But above all variables, they've still got difference-makers like Sid, like Geno and, yeah, like Karlsson. He hasn't won, but he's partaken in 67 career playoff games with 53 points -- eight goals, 45 assists -- a plus-4 rating and an outrageous average ice-time of 26:33 to show for it.
Takes one to know one ...
"He's just somebody that I felt like always elevated," Sid would say of Karlsson. "As good as he is, he always found another level in the playoffs. That's something that, from playing against him, you understood that. You knew that he had the ability to make an incredible play that could change the game."
He grinned and looked over toward the No. 65 stall.
"It's way better having him on our team. I've seen what he's capable of and what he can do, and he's been doing it all year."
Suffice it to say he's ready.
"I'm really excited about this," he'd say upon initially seeing me on this day. "It's gonna be fun. I'm gonna have fun with it. I'm excited about it."
And then, after our conversation, after I'd stood up and started walking away, he caught my attention one more time to simply say, "Hey, I'm really excited about this."
He didn't need to shout it to the whole room this time. They know.
THE ASYLUM
DK: Karlsson's Stanley Cup chase just beginning
Great players win championships.
Unless, of course, they don't.
Dan Marino, Barry Sanders, Randy Moss, Jim Kelly, Dick Butkus ... never won it all in the NFL. Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, Ken Griffey Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ralph Kiner ... never won it all in Major League Baseball. Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Allen Iverson, Patrick Ewing ... never won it all in the NBA.
And in the NHL, the league that'll once again take a springtime center stage in our city Saturday night with Game 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs between the Penguins and Flyers, this unfortunate category can count the legitimately great Marcel Dionne, Jarome Iginla, Henrik Lundqvist, Dale Hawerchuk, Gilbert Perreault, Mike Gartner, Pavel Bure, Adam Oates, Mats Sundin, Norm Ullman and so many more who've hung up the skates without the hoisting.
Erik Karlsson's got no interest in being labeled any such way.
Never has, actually.
At the same time, while he's been awarded the Norris Trophy three times, while he's put up 936 points to push up to 12th on the NHL's all-time list for defensemen, while he's blurred past so many of the game's most iconic figures -- I had to inform him myself in Salt Lake City a month ago that he'd passed, oh, you know, just Bobby Orr -- and while he's cemented himself as a first-ballot Hall of Famer in his own right ... Karlsson not only hasn't won the Cup, he hasn't even reached a Final.
"Close, though. Twice," as he'd remind me in a good talk we had at his stall following practice Thursday at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex. "And we should've had it in 2019."
Everyone in these parts will recall how his 2017 run ended with the Senators in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference final against you-know-who:
Like yesterday, huh?
For him, too.
"I mean, it's been brutal for me playing against those guys over the course of my career. I never had any real success," Karlsson would say with a small smile, recalling this elimination and a second-round one in 2013. "So it'll be nice to have them on my side."
The 2019 elimination, while in San Jose, saw the favored Sharks lose to the Blues in six games of the Western Conference final.
"If we were healthy, I think we win everything," he'd recall of injury losses to critical players like Joe Pavelski, Tomas Hertl and, yeah, Joe Thornton, another of those names that probably belongs on those lists up there. "That one hurt a lot. You could feel that one."
At least he could feel it. What'd follow was a whole lot of hollow. No more playoffs in San Jose. And even after being traded to Pittsburgh in August of 2023, a choice he had to approve via the no-trade clause in his contract, principally because he hoped to chase a championship alongside his prior tormentors, there'd be no playoffs here, either.
Until now.
"Obviously, this is why I came here to begin with," he'd say. "I believe in this group. From an outside perspective, and being here now for three years, the potential's always been there."
____________________
I can't be certain how he knew that, but I'll vouch for his sincerity.
Upon his arrival almost three years ago, as he'd eventually share with me, he'd been most nervous about meeting Kris Letang. Not Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, the resident icons, but the third and least heralded member of the franchise's fabled Core. The reason was that he knew he'd be, to some degree, chewing up some of Letang's long-standing role as No. 1 defenseman, notably on the power play. And, as had happened similarly in San Jose with Brent Burns, he hoped to make it clear that a roster really could house two No. 1s.
So a week before training camp, he found Letang where he’s easily found, the fitness room, introduced himself and worked out with him all that morning. Then the next morning. Then the next morning.
It was speaking Letang's language without having to learn a lick of French.
"He's been such a professional," Letang would tell me at the time. "I can't say enough."
I was impressed. But I wasn't fully wowed by this facet until a few weeks later following an overtime loss in Philadelphia. He'd been quietly complaining to me about some stuff that'd gone awry that night. Not about anyone or anything super-specific, mind you, just a general venting. And, as I'd begun to respond, he then chose to raise his voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room: "BUT NO, THAT MAKES TOO MUCH SENSE, DOESN'T IT?"
Pure silence.
I still have no idea what he meant, but the message was sent to those who mattered.
The more he was around, the more frustrated he became, in particular with Mike Sullivan. And that made sense to me. Karlsson's entire hockey career, beginning with his childhood in tiny Landsbro, Sweden, was founded on the freedom to create. He'd grown up idolizing Peter Forsberg, Nicklas Lidstrom, Daniel Alfredsson, Sundin and other Swedish stars, and he'd been allowed by that nation's advanced developmental system to be his best self, mistakes and all, through the junior ranks. He could fly, and no one wanted to ground him:
Sullivan, who'd profess that he'd "never want to take our great players' sticks out of their hands," didn't necessarily want to ground him, either. But he'd always held his defensemen here to a different standard to adhere to his system. They couldn't leave their lanes. They couldn't do this or that without proper cover. They couldn't try passes across the vertical middle. And when that checklist began being imposed upon Karlsson, he predictably bit back.
Dan Muse took a different approach, one that also could've been seen when, on the opening day of camp this past September, he dictated his first power-play drills with these five players: Sid, Geno, Karlsson, Bryan Rust and Rickard Rakell.
Same five he sent out in this practice on this day. Same five who'd proceed to push the Penguins back near the top of the NHL's power-play rankings. Same five who'd grasp right away that Muse expected his best players to be his best players, and that they wouldn’t be his best players if he held them back.
Karlsson found love at first sight.
"All he wants is for you to be the best that you can be at what you do," he'd tell me of Muse, essentially echoing everyone else in the room on this subject all season. "He tells us the expectations that he has of us, and it's up to us to meet those expectations."
Rakell, Karlsson's best bud in the room, took that further.
"When you have someone like Karl, someone who can change a game, who can do all the things he does, you let him do that," Rakell would tell me. "Everyone sees now, especially in Pittsburgh, who he is and what makes him so great."
Now, yeah. But the first two seasons, both under Sullivan, saw scoring outputs of 56 and 53 points, or roughly half of the 101 he had in San Jose the previous season in winning the Norris again. The 2024-25 season also saw a minus-24 rating to go with the first sluggish skating of his life, visible enough that it'd become common in the press box to hear Kyle Dubas, the GM who'd acquired him, barking from the back, 'C'MON KARL! SKATE!'
No more, it's safe to say.
It didn't get a ton of attention, but Karlsson was just named team MVP for the season, the first non-Sid player to get that in six years. And good luck finding anyone to disagree.
"He carried us. He got us here," Anthony Mantha, he of the team-leading 33 goals, was telling me on this day. "Look, I'm aware of what everyone in here does and how it takes all of us to make it happen. But what he did these past few weeks ..."
He didn't need to finish. We all saw it:
That's Connor Hellebuyck up there, kids. That's no joke.
And neither was Kevin Hayes joking when he recently called Karlsson "the best player in the NHL" post-Olympic break, with Karlsson running up 11 goals and 20 assists in 24 games to rank first among defensemen and 11th among all skaters, all while logging 24:31 of ice time and commanding both the power play and penalty-kill from the back end.
Needless to say, Dubas hasn't been quite as audible these days.
When Karlsson was hit with a lower-body injury in January, he returned well ahead of schedule for a game in, of all places, Edmonton, which some defensemen, especially one slowed in the legs, might welcome skipping given the extra challenge of staring down Connor McDavid between the blue lines.
"He could've waited," Dubas would say earlier this week, referring to a spate of free days the Penguins had after that. "Instead, he worked to get back into that game."
And once the Olympics were over, and the Penguins knew they'd be without Sid, only to soon lose Geno and others, Dubas recalled: "When you're in our room, everyone looks to Sid for everything. But with Sid out, that gave Erik a chance to be at his best in terms of leadership. You know, put a little more of the onus and responsibility on himself. And that's where it all really started to come together."
As in, all of it.
"The whole year, he'd been really good defensively. The coaches trusted him on the penalty-kill. They really put him into a spot to take different steps, and his skating's always been so great, the puck movement ... but this year, it's been the defending."
No doubt. His game's been built from the back out, as much as I've ever seen it. He's been magical with the puck in large part because he's been the one seizing it.
"It's been great to see him play at this level, especially at this age," Dubas continued, referring to Karlsson being 35. "It just leads you to think there's a lot more left in the tank for him. And the guys now, they want to try to help win FOR him. Because he's one of those guys who hasn't gotten to the finish line in the playoffs."
Brief pause.
"Yet."
____________________
No one can know what's ahead, even immediately. I see the Penguins as a superior overall team to a significant chunk of this playoff field, while also acknowledging that, the deeper they'd go, their skaters might have to be superior to an exaggerated extreme to overcome the .851-save-percentage goaltending that's been gotten from Stuart Skinner and Arturs Silovs the past few weeks.
Maybe it's there. They're as healthy as they've been in some time. They're fast. They've got the youth to feel fresh enough. They're skilled. They're smart.
But above all variables, they've still got difference-makers like Sid, like Geno and, yeah, like Karlsson. He hasn't won, but he's partaken in 67 career playoff games with 53 points -- eight goals, 45 assists -- a plus-4 rating and an outrageous average ice-time of 26:33 to show for it.
Takes one to know one ...
"He's just somebody that I felt like always elevated," Sid would say of Karlsson. "As good as he is, he always found another level in the playoffs. That's something that, from playing against him, you understood that. You knew that he had the ability to make an incredible play that could change the game."
He grinned and looked over toward the No. 65 stall.
"It's way better having him on our team. I've seen what he's capable of and what he can do, and he's been doing it all year."
Suffice it to say he's ready.
"I'm really excited about this," he'd say upon initially seeing me on this day. "It's gonna be fun. I'm gonna have fun with it. I'm excited about it."
And then, after our conversation, after I'd stood up and started walking away, he caught my attention one more time to simply say, "Hey, I'm really excited about this."
He didn't need to shout it to the whole room this time. They know.
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