PITTSBURGH -- The last time the NHL saw a comparable list of offensive talent on one team was in the 1980s, when the Edmonton Oilers made go-go hockey all the rage.
But even though the Pittsburgh Penguins boast such firepower as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marian Hossa and Sergei Gonchar, there is a big difference between the Pens and the Oilers dynasty.
Where Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey and company were quite happy to win 8-6, and often needed the acrobatics of goaltender Grant Fuhr to do so, the Penguins can just as easily win the 1-0 games, as the New York Rangers are learning in the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs.
You might have to go back to the Montreal Canadiens dynasty of the late 1970s, which won four consecutive Stanley Cups, to find a team that can play the game any way an opponent cares to and thoroughly thump them at it.
A lot of teams like to brag about having 1-2 punches. This Pittsburgh team has a 1-2-3-4 punch.
If the kids who centre the first two lines, 20-year-old Crosby and Malkin, 19, don't leave you gasping for air as they zip around with the puck, then another teenager, centre Jordan Staal, and his wingers, Jarkko Ruutu and Tyler Kennedy, will come out and shut your top line down.
Not even the fourth line, with centre Maxime Talbot, enforcer Georges Laraque and left-winger Adam Hall, presents a liability.
Laraque is one of the few fighters on the ice regularly at playoff time and he is acquitting himself well. And that was Hall on the ice in the last 30 seconds on Sunday, helping kill a two-man disadvantage, when he scored an empty-net goal to ice a 2-0 Penguins win that put them up 2-0 going into the third game of the best-of-seven semi-final this evening at Madison Square Garden.
In six playoff games in 2008, the Penguins have allowed a mere nine goals, while scoring 23. The closest active team is the Detroit Red Wings, who have given up 16 goals in eight games.
The defensive game extends to their penalty killing. In their six games, the Penguins have coughed up only two power-play goals for a 90.9-per-cent success rate, which ties them for second in the postseason rankings with the Boston Bruins.
What matters now is the Penguins have blanked the Rangers on nine power-play chances in two games, including two in the last six minutes of the second game.
Penguins head coach Michel Therrien deserves credit for convincing his young players to embrace his defensive system. They have done it with enough enthusiasm that peer pressure is quickly asserted on any shirkers.
"If a player does not do what he's supposed to do [defensively], when that player comes back to the bench the other guys let him know about it," Therrien said yesterday as his team prepared to fly to New York. "That's the most important thing, that players buy into what you're doing. It doesn't mean you'll win every game, but it means you'll have a chance."
The system boils down to keeping the enemy shooters to the outside and blocking as many shots as possible. The Rangers have not been allowed to linger in goaltender Marc-André Fleury's crease for long, which is the reason why he had a relatively easy time ringing up a shutout on Sunday.
"I'm not going to suggest it was really easy for [Fleury], but it certainly could have been tougher," Rangers head coach Tom Renney said.
According to Therrien, the big difference in the penalty killing was made at the trade deadline on Feb. 26, when the Penguins acquired defenceman Hal Gill and forwards Hossa and Pascal Dupuis. All three, he said, improved the unit, which had a middling 80.4-per-cent success rate before the deadline to an 85.1 mark between then and the end of the regular season.
Along with defence partner Rob Scuderi, Gill is assigned guard duty on Rangers star Jaromir Jagr. It's a duty Gill pulled regularly with his last two NHL teams, the Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs, because he knows how to use his 6-foot-7 frame and accompanying wingspan to neutralize the league's scoring aces. Jagr had two assists in the first game of the series, but was much less of a threat in the second game.
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