ST. PAUL, Minn. -- When the Penguins' power play is producing a solitary goal over 13 opportunities, it tends to resemble the iconic Peanuts statues scattered across Rice Park in the heart of this quaint city: Charlie Brown's way over here, Peppermint Patty way over there and ... well, if native son Charles Schulz, himself a noted hockey fan, were still around to script the scene, we'd probably have Lucy pulling away the football just when we thought all was well.
So, bear that in mind, please, when weighing that power play having achieved an apparent 2-of-6 breakout in the 6-4 victory over the Wild on this Thursday night at Xcel Energy Center.
At the same time, get a good look at this:
And no, not just Kris Letang's compact-windup blast for his overdue first goal of the season, the one that gave the visitors the lead for good.
Look around at the full formation. How four white sweaters are semi-crowded into the same area. How Jake Guentzel's right in front. How Sidney Crosby's just off to the right edge, where he's always most dangerous, and how just before feeding Letang he'd looked off to Bryan Rust at the opposite edge to fool old friend Freddy Gaudreau so badly that Freddy'd take a tumble.
Sure, this was a five-on-three. There's a ton of real estate out there. But this power play seems to prefer spreading out under any circumstance so, between this case and a later five-on-four power play, when they pulled off the same collapse-the-crease approach again to pepper Filip Gustavsson from the same range ... it felt by design.
Was it?
"Yeah, that's what happens," Letang would tell me of the collapse. "But I think it's also the fact that we want to simplify right now. We're not having so much success, so we want to simplify pucks there. And, you know, whether it's rebound or deflection, you get your goals there."
They certainly should, anyway.
Funny, but Mike Sullivan cited simplification when I brought this up with him, as well.
"We're just trying to get them to simplify the game a little bit," he said of his power-play participants. "Take some of the thinking out of it and not look for a better play. Let's shoot the puck and let's go to the net, create opportunity off the rebound. I think that's when our power play's at its best. In my opinion, we have some of the best players in the game around the blue paint. There's nobody better than Sid, for example. I think Jake excels in that area. So, we've got to get the puck there more, and we've got to get people there more."
I teased Letang, who waited a month before registering his first power-play shot, how much difference he alone can make.
"I'm shooting. I'm definitely taking shots," he replied with a smile. "You've seen that, right?"
I have. Gustavsson not so much.
