Kovacevic: This isn't about Fleury vs. Murray, not at this stage

OTTAWA -- Marc-Andre Fleury should, must and will start Game 4.

There. We good with that part now?

No?

Ha! Well, I sure didn't think that case could be made easily on this particular occasion, coming so soon after the Flower's first full-blown wilting of these Stanley Cup playoffs:











Yeah, he blew it, all right. He conceded four goals on the first nine shots of the Penguins' 5-1 flop against the Senators in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference final Wednesday night at Canadian Tire Centre, he was benched by Mike Sullivan, and Matt Murray made it look all the worse by coming on and stopping 19 of the 20 pucks put his way.

Hard to imagine, shy of some incapacitating injury, how the evening could have gone any worse for the team's very best performer in these playoffs.

He didn't exactly beat himself up afterward ...

"Yeah, they came hard, and we expected that," Fleury was saying in the cramped, mostly silent visiting locker room. "They got a couple of lucky bounces, weird bounces, I think. Like always in the playoffs, I think we've all been good with short memories. Just put this one behind us, move on to the next one, get right back at it."

... But then, he didn't need to beat himself up. That had been done.

A bad night's a bad night. Go ahead and blame all concerned. Point to all the blanks on offense, too. But the bottom line, as I see it, was this: Even if a soft/lost defense was primarily responsible for the middle two goals, the bookends were abysmal. Fleury had no business being off his pipe for the Mike Hoffman bank, and he looked awful allowing Zack Smith to yank him from left to right, then scorch him on a backhand stuff.

Those can't happen.

They can't happen on a February night against the Flames, and they certainly can't happen in a potential swing game a step shy of the Stanley Cup Final.

So OK. There it is. There it was, anyway. It's done.

Now take a deep breath, bury all 12 minutes and 52 seconds of that debacle, and focus on the infinitely more important broader picture: The Penguins are three wins shy of the Final. They've made it this far despite waves of injuries, now including Justin Schultz, Patric Hornqvist and Bryan Rust. They're still, by any reasonable account, the favorites to take this series that's got a two-two split in home ice the rest of the way.

Oh, and this: They're Fleury's team.

That's not sentimentality speaking. It's ice-cold fact. He's been building to this level of play for months now, and it's peaked in these playoffs when -- this is probably worth repeating -- he's been the team's very best performer. He carried them through the Blue Jackets' barrage of shots, he stole at least two of the wins against the Capitals almost singlehandedly, and he stayed sharp through the first two games of this one.

Here's guessing the head coach grasps all that, though he wasn't about to divulge anything right after the final horn when asked who might start Game 4.

"I haven't even given any consideration to that at this point," Sullivan replied to a reporter. "We give up four goals as quickly as we did ... sometimes when you make a change, it's for more than one reason. It's a change for the whole group, and sometimes you can effect some positive reaction to it. It's a little bit of a wakeup call, I guess, for the whole group."

Pressed again on that later, he essentially echoed: "Quite honestly, I haven't even gotten there yet. We're still trying to digest this game that we just played. And we'll sleep on it, and we'll make decisions moving forward."

He did make clear he wasn't exactly thrilled with Fleury's role in the period, notably this assessment: "It wasn't like we gave up a lot of scoring chances. We didn't. But they all seemed to go in the net."

Almost in the same breath, though, he swung right back to the collective: "I think it's a readiness thing. I think it's ... you know, it's a hunger. We've got to play with more conviction. Our team is usually a team that plays that way. So to come out in the first period and not bring the necessary conviction that we need to be effective is disappointing."

Some of his players found far less flattering terms: