"Don't poke the Bear!" was how Brooks Orpik would word it.
This was eons ago, it seems, and it was how he'd describe the inherent idiocy of the Penguins' opponents ever provoking Evgeni Malkin. And yes, that 'B' up there is appropriately capitalized since the reference was to their own Russian Bear.
So when the following was witnessed in the opening minute of a 4-2 flattening of the NHL-leading Lightning on this Wednesday night at PPG Paints Arena ...
... I couldn't help but publicly share this caustic observation a few seconds later:
Dan Girardi levels Malkin inside the Pittsburgh blue line, dropping him on his derriere. Crowd oooohs at the site. We'll see what impact that has. Usually best to just leave him be. #DKPS #Penguins
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) January 31, 2019
Mind you, there's nothing remotely wrong with the check. Girardi's always been a fierce, physical competitor, and he catches Malkin, chin down, trying to find the puck in his skates. He then cleanly drives the shoulder into the chest.
But context is everything, and the context here began Monday night, when the last-place Devils pitched a no-hitter at the Penguins and prevailed. They didn't just let sleeping dogs lie. They patted the sleeping dogs gently on the head, stole the bone, urinated on the tree and whisked out of the yard.
The context then carried into Malkin's next few shifts after the Girardi check, not least of which was this breathtaking, Paul Coffey-esque coast-to-coast eruption:
Imagine if Malkin had blown by Girardi there at the end, huh?
Flash-forward, barely a minute later:
This time, it was an aborted rush by one of Malkin's linemates, Bryan Rust. But yeah, that's 71 in gold on the neutral-zone trackback at the right boards. The pass went tape-to-tape to Rust to spring a two-on-one, culminating in the Phil Kessel swat artfully captured atop this column by Matt Sunday.
Penguins 2, Girardi minus-2.
And Malkin would wind up with another assist, a couple shots, a hit, a takeaway, a block and ... oh, right, an $18.2 million mega-prizefight with Steven Stamkos in which he acquitted himself well enough to at least land on top of Tampa Bay's captain, who sure looked from this perspective to initiate the gloves dropping.
Malkin wasn't around afterward, but Stamkos answered, "No," when asked if he'd been seeking a fight, adding, "I thought he gave me a little whack there, I gave him one back ... and we fought. That’s just hockey.”
Maybe the Lightning would have been better off sticking to hockey. Instead, they ran up a staggering 59 official hits, most by any of the Penguins' opponents all winter, not even counting two blindside cheap shots from Cedric Paquette and all kinds of post-whistle mayhem from Alex Killorn.
Because this isn't just about waking Malkin. It's about waking a 20-man collaborative from their collective cot when, all too often, they look completely incapable of doing that without some figurative sledgehammer to the noggin.
"You hate to say it, but it makes a difference with us. It really does," Jack Johnson was telling me of that opening sequence. "Our bench, when Geno went down ... we bounced up. We were ready. We were ready to go. 'That's how you want to play? OK, we can do that, too.'"
By my count, there are five opponents that habitually play the Penguins physically: Capitals, Blue Jackets, Bruins, Lightning and just one Western team, the Jets.
Cumulative record now against those teams, all contenders: 7-2-1.
What Mike Sullivan underscored the most when I brought up this topic was that the Penguins haven't just blindly punched back when they've been hit -- though they did run up an abnormal total of their own with 39 -- but rather, that they've channeled that energy into being more focused, more determined and, maybe a bit ironically, more disciplined:
Crazy, isn't it?
These peculiar Penguins perform at their very peak when someone starts smacking them around.
Crazier still?
They lead the NHL in hits with 1,457.
• Similarly, a snarly Matt Murray has been a sharper one.
• Of the Penguins' 39 hits here, eight were by Johnson, six by Garrett Wilson and four each by Juuso Riikola and -- a-hem -- Sidney Crosby. All kinds of ways to lead.
• Another way: Between Crosby's goal at 8:12 of the first, the one that made it 3-0, and the early part of the second, the Penguins had gone nearly 17 minutes without a shot. That's when Crosby and Jake Guentzel, on a four-on-four, began churning through the Tampa Bay zone for the first significant pressure in forever. And that's when Letang -- stay with me on this because it's rapid-fire -- blocked a shot by Brayden Point, hit Nikita Kucherov, ripped a slap shot saved by Andrei Vasilevskiy, had another shot blocked, and took another snap shot on Vasilevskiy.
Next shift, less than two minutes later, he scored.
Clip and save for Norris Trophy consideration.
• I'd have attached the Letang goal to the previous entry, but that wouldn't do justice to what preceded it, so here it is with the full rewind of Kessel's 600-foot skating exhibition:
These are plays the overaged varsity kid makes when he's just messing around in a JV practice.
• As I'd imagined the moment the words came from Sullivan's mouth the other night, the semi-threat to change the power play was pure bluff. Same five players were deployed with the first unit, except for the one occasion Malkin was in the box when Riikola took his place for a two-D formation.
"We talked about going that way, anyway, deeper into the game," Sullivan said. "That's something we discussed between periods. We discuss that quite often. And depending on how the power play goes ... there's some nights where they're really on the puck and dynamic. If that's the case, sometimes we just stay with the four forwards."
Translation: False alarm.
And smartly so, because, as I wrote after that New Jersey game, Sullivan had/has almost no plausible options for removing any one of the five players involved. That's both the blessing and curse of coaching a superstar-based roster.
• Don't be surprised if Crosby gets one of those maintenance days from practice Thursday. Looked like he might have stretched his groin late in the second period straddling the Tampa Bay blue line. Left for the final minute and change but returned for the third.
• Can't say enough about Garrett Wilson's big check on his first shift. The Lightning came out hot, and the hit changed possession, followed by a strong Wilson rush, followed by Riley Sheahan's icebreaker at 3:25. There's value in being physical, so long as it's accompanied by all the other essentials.
This is also why atop my trade wish list for the Penguins is a bruising top-six winger. They're out there.
• The Bolts are where they are in the standings, and they might load up even further at the deadline. But until Vasilevskiy's gotten the job done in the playoffs, he's going to be their question mark. On this night, it was three goals on the first five shots he saw, four on the first eight. He's prone to that sort of thing.
• Derick Brassard's hurt?
OK, no reason not to take the Penguins at their word, but it requires processing that Brassard made it through a full practice Wednesday, spoke with the media once he was done -- which would have been really odd had he been hurt -- then didn't even take the ice for a casual test drive for the game-day skate the next day. After the skate, Sullivan stated clearly that all players who didn't participate were available for this game.
Add to that a rather tortured explanation from Sullivan about Brassard's status after the game: "Brass has been dealing with just a nagging upper-body injury the last few days. The reason I didn't divulge it this morning is because there's a chance he was gonna play and, if he did play, we would rather keep that type of information to ourselves. We chose to hold him out."
Not suggesting anything sinister here. Just providing full context.
• Teddy Blueger logged a mere 6:22, and I still noticed his fire more than I could from Brassard over a full week.
• Two assists from Malkin gave him 600 for his career, which keeps him on a historic pace among countrymen ...
... but also has him within 15 points of 1,000. If anyone recalls what a burden that became for Crosby a couple years ago, this might not be a welcome development.
• On another milestone note, Letang tying Coffey atop the franchise list with 108 goals shouldn't go unappreciated. As my friend Paul Steigerwald is fond of saying, "It's the golden age of hockey in Pittsburgh." Letang's a more prominent part of that than maybe any of us can realize in the moment.
• Friday night's final: Senators 11, Penguins 1
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins vs. Lightning, PPG Paints Arena, Jan. 30, 2019 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS
