"Everybody. That's who had something to say. Everybody."
That was Marcus Pettersson.
It's a stretch to portray the Penguins' second intermission Sunday as having been pivotal to saving their season. There's still a ton of hockey left, and a single point in the standings can be overcome with a single shot.
And yet ...
There they sat at their stalls, fresh off heaving away another multiple-goal lead, humbled right back into a tie game and, worse by far, having to kill off most of a four-minute high-sticking minor once they'd retake the ice.
So yeah, from what I was told by Pettersson and several other players, they spoke up. A bunch of them. Sidney Crosby. Kris Letang. Evgeni Malkin. Patric Hornqvist. Brian Dumoulin. Matt Cullen. The voices, by all accounts, came from all corners.
"We felt like we could change the game," Pettersson told me. "Those big penalties, if you can kill them, it's such a positive. That's how we looked at it."
"We knew we couldn't give one up there," Dumoulin would essentially echo. "We wanted to use it to our advantage, to shift the game our way."
"You knew it then," Letang would add at the next stall. "It's a 3-3 game, they had four minutes on the power play, and they could turn the game around. But if we can kill it, the momentum goes back on our side. And that's what happened."
Sure did. Penguins 6, Rangers 5.
Letang was instrumental in the kill, with back-to-back blocks ...
... but Cullen was front and center, taking one 20-second breather for that 42-year-old frame before hopping right back over the boards, paired with Bryan Rust and backed by Letang and Dumoulin. The other set -- and Mike Sullivan trusted only two for the entire time -- had a couple of rookies up front, Teddy Blueger and Zach Aston-Reese, backed by Jack Johnson and Chad Ruhwedel.
New York's power play, which had been humming at 10-for-30 clip over the previous dozen games, often set up, occasionally swarmed, but put only two pucks on Casey DeSmith, both fairly harmless. The faceoffs were clean, the positioning flawless, the sticks in perfect place for a New York power play that prefers dissecting the box.
"The guys took away all the seams," DeSmith recalled. "The Rangers really liked hitting those seams, and our guys did a good job with that, for sure."
As the ticks wound down, Crosby stood and bounced eagerly in the box, the capacity crowd of 18,646 stood and roared to a very Pittsburgh-like crescendo for a big kill, one final clearance was made ... and that was it.
Until Crosby channeled all that eagerness, following the ensuing faceoff, right down the rink into this:
Stop the tape a moment and marvel at that. Not just because it brought the Penguins the lead for keeps. Not just the top-shelf finish, which, as Letang was gleefully confessing afterward, he saw and crushed. But also how Crosby passes to the player he trusts most in the world, even though he appears to be covered by New York's Filip Chytil.
"But I'm not, really," as Letang would explain to me. "I'm coming off the bench and going hard toward Sid. Sid knows that. The guy's gonna go with Sid's pass, so he's skating my way, and I just have to go around him."
Nice. Also, a stick tap to Jake Guentzel for engulfing poor Alexandar Georgiev in the blue paint.
It's the little things, huh?
Anyway, that was Letang's second goal of the afternoon, and it'd soon be topped by two Malkin goals, one of them obscene to make it 6-3 within a three-goal 5:19 whirlwind once Crosby returned. The young, quick Rangers would rally, but the game had been decided precisely when pretty much everyone had expected it would.
Including the opposition.
"We got demoralized and they got a new set of energy, a new lift," New York coach David Quinn observed of the kill. "The whole complexion of the game changed. It was really unfortunate."
Eh, not for everyone:
[caption id="attachment_775769" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
A young fan cheers the end of the Penguins' big kill. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS[/caption]
This will be the new norm, I'm betting. This group has been insanely inconsistent all winter, but that's got to expire. All they achieved leading into this game was falling into a 5-8-1 funk. All they achieved in taking these two points was slipping one ahead of the idle Hurricanes for the East's final playoff spot at 31-21-7. Next up are the Devils, who they never beat, then the Sharks, who emasculated them last month in San Jose, and then all the outdoor fuss next weekend in Philadelphia.
Better start finding a way, even when things look bleak.
"That's how it's going to be," Dumoulin said. "Everything's really tight right now. A lot of teams are fighting for playoff spots. We feel like that's going to make us better in the long run. If we keep chipping away, getting points in these games, bearing down ... that'll be beneficial when it gets to be playoff time. We've just got to embrace the race here."
Dumoulin, more of a leader on the team than maybe most realize, began espousing that message with his mates out on the West Coast. Now, possibly, it's resonating.
"I believe we have what it takes," Sullivan would speak from the podium a bit later. "That's what I told the players: We can't be afraid of it. We've got to get excited about it. We've talked about embracing it. And we have so much experience to draw on, playing in a high-stakes environment. We've just got to control what we can. I believe that, as long as we stay focused, stay on the game at hand, we've got what it takes to win."
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