Column: ‘As good a chance as any team’

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Pittsburgh Penguins v Washington Capitals

Patric Hornqvist celebrates his blistering wrister for a goal Wednesday night. — GETTY

BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC

WASHINGTON — “I feel the team we have now has as good a chance as any team in the NHL.”

I double-checked the audio, and those were, to the syllable, Jim Rutherford’s unfiltered, unflinching words outside the Penguins’ locker room at Verizon Center early Wednesday evening.

In fairness, the wily, old GM had to be feeling good in the moment. He had every right. He’d just completed yet another terrific trade by acquiring gritty forward Daniel Winnik from the Maple Leafs for Zach Sill, two draft picks and cash, which even with the Canadian currency adjustment amounts to somewhere between little and nothing. That won’t grab headlines or have the citizens flocking to Pittsburgh International flicking rose petals at Winnik’s feet, but it was a smart, patient deal — one that required a month of back-and-forth and at least one firm rejection from Toronto — that did right by his team and did so responsibly.

Best of all, Rutherford clearly got his No. 1 target.

“This,” he said, “was the one we wanted.”

He even declared he’ll likely remain dormant through the NHL’s Monday deadline, partly because of cap constraints but much more so, to hear him tell it, because he likes what he has.

“We’ll see what’s available,” he said, “but there’s a good chance that we’re done.”

Done, as in all it took to finish the job was a third-line, penalty-killing ace.

Yeah, I know. Wow.

But wait. Because for the fullest context of this scene, know and appreciate, please, that as Rutherford was meeting with us media types, less than an hour was left until faceoff of what undoubtedly would be his team’s most momentous game of the season.

You know, the one that wound up Penguins 4, Capitals 3 …

The one that avoided the embarrassment of being swept in all four games of the season series.

The one that finally, maybe, possibly began to right the course of the Penguins’ seriously misguided broader performance within the Metropolitan Division.

The one that might have represented the first step in proving Rutherford right.

“I like what we have here,” Marc-Andre Fleury was telling me after his 21-save victory. “You look around, and you tell me what’s missing. What don’t we have? There’s a lot of talent, a lot of depth, and now we added a little size … I like this.”

So, nothing missing at all?

“We just need to be more consistent. We need to play like we did tonight.”

You know, that might come across as overly simplistic, but it also might be painfully accurate. Consider the pattern in play over this modest little three-game winning streak: The Penguins came out skating hard against the Blues, got a couple of early goals, then kept up the pressure. They came out skating hard against the Panthers, got a couple of early goals, then kept up the pressure. None of which was any different than strikingly similar victories against the Oilers, Flames, Red Wings and Senators, all within this 7-3-1 stretch since Evgeni Malkin rejoined the lineup Feb. 4 in Edmonton.

“There isn’t much to it,” Bill Guerin was saying. “We have to skate.”

That’s it. Really, that’s probably all of it. The Penguins aren’t a punishing team, and they wouldn’t be one if they added a dozen Winniks. But they are, when they come out flying as they did in those unforgettable opening 10 minutes in Calgary, a dangerous opponent for … well, “any team in the NHL.” They’ve demonstrated that time and again, even when missing huge chunks of the roster.

Wednesday was no different.

“I liked the way we came out to start,” Mike Johnston said in his postgame session. “When you can come out like that against a team like Washington, and in this environment …”

Hold that thought. Because that’s the lone difference here.

If one accepts that the Penguins can, with their legs suitably revved up, skate with anyone, then one also must accept that it’s something else that goes so horribly wrong when they encounter the Rangers, Islanders, Flyers and yeah, these Capitals, who’d taken the first three meetings by a cumulative score of 10-1.

And that something else is that they’re easily annoyed and, concurrently, they easily lose their brains.

From Johnston’s first game coaching against the Flyers back in October, he noticed it. Actually, he was aghast not only at the lack of discipline on the ice but even at what he was hearing on the bench in front of him. Players weren’t focused on beating Philadelphia as much as who was running whom, who was saying what, all that sort of fluff that distracts from actual performance.

When the Penguins visited Winnipeg a couple of weeks later, Paul Maurice and the Jets ripped a page right out of the Philadelphia manual and ran the bodies and mouths all over the MTS Centre ice. The Penguins impressively prevailed by shootout that night, in no small part because they kept their composure.

Well, it’s one thing to keep composure against an unfamiliar opponent on the Manitoban plains. It’s quite another when the rancor builds up over so many more meetings. Which is why Johnston has urged the Penguins, every which way imaginable, to skate hard, hit hard and play hard against these divisional teams but not to get distracted.

There were promising signs to that effect in a recent loss at Philadelphia, but this was a step up.

“To our credit, I thought Washington ran around quite a bit and tried to get hits and tried to play outside their game, and we just stuck to our game,” Johnston said. “And it wasn’t just that. Early on, they got the three power plays in a row, and it didn’t rattle our group. We just killed the penalties and kept playing. We hung in there. We stuck with it.”

Sensing a pattern here?

Rewind to more Rutherford from earlier in the day: “I see a team that’s shown the past couple games how we’re capable of playing when we execute, when we do what we’re supposed to do. To me, that’s the only difference between those games and those losses last week to Washington and Columbus.”

This one wasn’t perfect. The power play, even with Crosby scoring on an actual shot attempted, went 1 for 6. Simon Despres and Robert Scuderi caved badly on a Washington three-on-two that brought the Capitals within 3-2 in the third. There were, in general, far too many unforced turnovers.

But there were far more positives, notably the early penalty-killing and, to repeat the refrain, the composure exhibited through not seeking retribution for Alexander Ovechkin’s wicked slash of Kris Letang last week in Pittsburgh or, more presently, for Washington’s Tom Wilson doing his best Zac Rinaldo impersonation in running around like a headless high-sticking chicken.

Truth be told, Wilson’s antics backfired in a big way, especially the one during the pregame warmup, when he bumped into Malkin near center red and the two exchanged words.

“I don’t know what that was about,” Malkin said. “But it’s OK. It’s good.”

It almost wasn’t. In the first period, the two were at it again in a strange skirmish that spilled over into the Penguins’ bench, one in which Malkin nearly lost his cool despite being officially on the bench at that point but was swiftly restrained by Rick Tocchet.

But otherwise, Malkin visibly used that as fuel for the fire, and he outskated everyone on the ice all night and richly earned the No. 1 star for his three assists.

“I had fun,” he said. “It was a good game.”

It’s funny, but for all we fuss over Crosby vs. Ovechkin, especially head to head …

graph 2-25 -2

… it’s all too often, as with this shared opportunity, that Malkin outshines both. He was brilliant.

Both Crosby and Malkin are capable of brilliance, though, and we know that. The broader question, and I dare say one that will outlast Rutherford’s unbridled optimism of the occasion, is whether or not the Penguins have enough in the supporting cast to succeed.

I asked that same question of both stars after this game …

All sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Me, I’m looking at 21 games remaining on the schedule, and I’ve only got two circled: April 1 vs. the Flyers, April 10 vs. the Islanders. Everything else feels increasingly like dress rehearsal.