Chasing The Cup
Pens Putting Pieces in Place
By Bob Grove

The Stanley Cup playoffs can be a funny business. Some teams come from the back of the pack to win the Cup, as the Penguins did in 1991 after failing even to qualify for the playoffs one year earlier. Others establish themselves as perennial favorites but never quite match expectations, certainly the case with a Detroit franchise that has reached the Finals once in the last seven seasons despite finishing first or second overall six times.

Even those teams that have won championships recently found their formula for success fleeting; the Anaheim Ducks last month became the fifth consecutive defending Cup champion to fail to reach the second round. One of those, the Carolina Hurricanes, missed the playoffs entirely the next spring.

It's been 10 years since the National Hockey League had back-to-back champions, and only two teams have done it in the past 19 years: the 1992 Penguins and 1998 Red Wings.

Undeniably, there is a certain magic that some teams or some players - Washington's John Druce in 1990 comes to mind - find once the hockey calendar turns to April and beyond. But what exactly are some of the components of that magic? And as the Penguins emerged from their first-round sweep of Ottawa and began to work their way through the Eastern Conference semifinals against the New York Rangers, how much of it did they possess?

Goaltending

Just like a pitcher in the World Series or a quarterback in the Super Bowl, a goaltender frequently has more to say about a hockey club's post-season fate than any one else in his dressing room. Three of the last six Conn Smythe Trophy winners as playoff MVPs have been goaltenders, as have one-third of all winners since the honor was first established in 1965.

When Montreal general manager Bob Gainey traded away Cristobal Huet at the deadline in February, no one in Montreal hesitated to draw the historic parallel between the instant promotion of rookie Carey Price to the Canadiens' No. 1 job and what had happened to two other young Montreal goaltenders - Ken Dryden (1971) and Patrick Roy (1986) both won the Conn Smythe.

Price had two shutouts in the Canadiens' first-round win over Boston, becoming just the third goaltender in Montreal's storied history to earn a shutout in a Game 7. Despite some bumps in the road in Games 5 and 6, Price was mostly poised throughout his first Stanley Cup series, and his confidence seemed to permeate the rest of the roster.

The same was true in the Penguins' quick dispatching of Ottawa, as Marc-Andre Fleury exorcised the playoff ghosts that had been haunting him since the 2004 World Junior Championships. He was fully in control of his game from the start and playing the best hockey of his NHL career.

"You think, 'How can a goalie have an effect on the way you play, even though you don't play the position?' But he just does," Pittsburgh defenseman Rob Scuderi said on the eve of the Rangers' series. "You can tell the team's confident in the way he's playing, the way he's moving the puck, all the little things he's doing correctly.

"It just makes you feel a little more at ease, that you know your goalie is in a good place mentally."

Details, details

As anyone who's been through it can tell you, the Stanley Cup playoffs are rarely about pretty. They're more about gritty. In the Penguins' seven-man defensive unit, Darryl Sydor was the odd man out in the Ottawa series. But having won the Cup in both Dallas in 1999 and Tampa Bay in 2004, he knows what it takes.

"It's grueling to win those 16 games," he said. "When you look back at it, and everything you go through, it's the little things that win you the games. Maybe a lot of little things and then maybe there might be a nice goal, but it's not always a pretty play.

"It's often an ugly game where you're just chipping the puck in, where instead of toe drags and saucer passes, it might be just dump the puck in and forecheck - and that's for everybody from the big scorer on down."

The high-flying Penguins of 1991 and 1992 could play that game when they had to, so the willingness to adapt is crucial. In fact, says Sydor, it's often the difference between winning and losing.

"It all comes down to guys buying into the system, doing extraordinary things that you might not be doing usually: a skilled guy might be finishing a check; a hard-working guy might be getting the big goal," he said. "It's about team, about guys coming out of their own skin to do everything they can to help the team win.

"It's the old saying that you have to be a part of that chain. You can't have one of those links break or the chain's gone. And I can say right now from the first series we had a lot of guys buy into the system and do the things that we needed to win."

Plumbers

In an environment where the game is often played from north to south, with all the requisite battles along the boards and in front of the net, it's a well-established fact that third- and fourth-line players take on added significance. The hard-working guys who play a simple game - the plumbers, in hockey parlance - have more to say about the outcome of playoff games than they do about regular-season games.

"It's always been like that, and it's probably always going to be like that," says fourth-line Pittsburgh center Max Talbot. "You need plumbers, guys who play a role, and sometimes that's how you win games. I think we have a good example of a team like that. Yes, the first and second lines are amazing, but the support guys have been doing pretty well since the start of the playoffs."

Talbot and his linemates, Georges Laraque and either Gary Roberts or Adam Hall, not only cycled well against the Senators but joined the No. 3 line of Jordan Staal, Jarkko Ruutu and Tyler Kennedy to score five goals in the Ottawa series.

"And it gives momentum to the first and second lines, too, when the third and fourth are playing that good," says Talbot.

Discipline

It is almost contradictory but true that the playoffs are about playing with emotion but yet not allowing those emotions to dictate how you play. That's what enables players to resist taking penalties when punching back would be the easiest thing to do.

"You're battling a guy in front, it's just part of the game. But it's also human nature," says Scuderi. "You know, you can only battle the guy for so long before you start to get pretty mad. But you also have to realize if you take a punch to the face or the back of the head or whatever, you're doing it for your teammates. You don't want to hurt those guys. I think that's the overriding theme that makes most guys not retaliate."

The Penguins displayed good discipline in the first round, playing short-handed only 13 times and killing 12 of those penalties. And they made the Senators pay for their transgressions, scoring six power-play goals. "Special teams," added Scuderi, "are everything in the post-season."

Confidence

Coaches and players alike are forced to make adjustments in the course of every playoff series, but for the best teams it's rarely a case of revamping the entire game plan. The teams that believe in their game stay true to it, which enables them to bounce back from even the most discouraging defeats.

"It's weird, but when you look around this room, we get leadership from a lot of different guys," says defenseman Brooks Orpik. "It seems like every guy has his own style of leadership and gives you a different piece of the puzzle, but there's no one guy who is that one vocal guy who stands up. I think more of it is confidence, really, the collective feeling in here that even when things aren't going well, we're going to work through it."