Stanley Cup Preview: 

      For Pittsburgh Penguins fans, their rematch with Detroit is about two things:  

1. Winning, 

2. Seeing Marian Hossa on the wrong end of a handshake line. 

If you believe the Penguins players, they’re only concerned about number one, and since number one entails number two, that’s good.   

      But I’m not buying for a minute that any player putting on a Pittsburgh jersey—at least the ones who played in last year’s Stanley Cup Finals, which was most of the team—isn’t keenly aware that Marian Hossa is opposing them because he felt that he had a better chance of winning the Stanley Cup in Detroit.  I’m a believer that it’s always possible for a person to have more motivation, and Hossa’s snub of Pittsburgh in favor of Detroit puts the pride of the Penguins’ jersey on the line in a way that it otherwise would not be.  You can say that Hossa’s assessment was correct at the time—and you’d be right—but even if you can’t hold it against Hossa personally, you can still want to see him proven wrong. 

      Now that the personal element is out of the way, two things are clear from watching this year’s playoffs, as opposed to last year’s: 

1. Detroit isn’t as dominant as they were last year 

2. The Penguins’ best players are better, and their system is better suited to their talent 

Conventional wisdom is that the Red Wings have Hossa on top of every good player from last year, and the Penguins don’t have Hossa—so this matchup favors the Red Wings more, right?  Even if the Red Wings win the Cup, conventional wisdom will be proven wrong for three reasons: 

1. Crosby and Malkin have linemates that allow each to generate offense without the other.  You might be able to count the number of shifts Sid and Geno take together in the series, that aren’t power-play shifts, on two hands.   This means that Detroit is going to have to pick its matchups more carefully at home, and that in Pittsburgh, the Red Wings will be even less certain who will take the ice against them. 

2. The Red Wings’ penalty killing is just bad.  They’re killing penalties at a 73.7% (14^th/16th) clip in the playoffs, and they only killed penalties at a 78.3% (25th/30) rate in the regular season.  Bad penalty killing against a power play with Sidney Crosby, Evegeni Malkin and Sergei Gonchar could prove to be disastrous for the Red Wings, if they take too many penalties.  Fortunately, the Red Wings are a disciplined team and don’t take penalties, right? 

3. The Penguins’ new system.  Under Michel Therrien, the Penguins played a passive game that involved trapping in the neutral zone, patience, and strict defensive discipline.  It was a good system to instill responsibility in a young team, but ultimately it didn’t work for the Penguins’ personnel.  Because it was so passive, even when it generated turnovers, teams could still find #87 or #71 and take them out of the play because the system didn’t generate enough speed coming the other way.  It also hurt that #87 didn’t have linemates that could finish for most of the season. 

The Red Wings knew how to exploit the Penguins’ passive trap with superior skill and passing last year, and they had a responsible enough defense to check the scoring opportunities that the Penguins generated.  If the Penguins were still playing Therrien’s system, this would be an easy series to pick—Detroit in 5. 

But the Penguins are playing a new system that emphasizes offense as the best defense.  New coach Dan Bylsma believes that time in an opponents’ offensive end is incredibly important—it might be the first stat he looks to after the score, just as third-down completions are the first stat I look for after the score of a football game.  Bylsma’s system emphasizes speed, so that even when a team clears the puck out of the Penguins’ end, the forwards are backchecking hard and fast, so defensemen can play aggressively at the Penguins’ defensive blue-line.  This allows defensemen to pressure forwards as they try to enter the zone, creating turnovers and allowing the forwards who are backchecking with speed to turn and slingshot back the other way with speed through the neutral zone. 

Detroit’s defense is responsible, but it is not the fastest defense in the league.  It is skilled and experienced, but it is also old.  The Penguins up-tempo, but still disciplined, game will lead to chances where the Red Wings defense looks old and slow. 

Prediction: The Penguins win Game 1 and split in Detroit.  Games 3 and 4 belong to the Penguins at home, and the Red Wings stave off elimination in Game 5.  But Game 6 at Mellon Arena will be won by the Penguins, and the best player to play the game since #66 will raise Lord Stanley’s Cup.