There is but one certainty as the NHL prepares to resume its 2019-20 season, and that's that there are no certainties.
Going directly from a four-plus month shutdown to a best-of-five survival series is unprecedented, which is why there is no way to predict with complete confidence how teams, let alone individual players, will respond.
What will be a bigger asset, experience or young legs? Will goalies be ahead of shooters, or vice versa? Will personnel combinations and matchups that worked -- or didn't -- during the regular season produce the same results in these unusual circumstances?
Although hard evidence is in precious short supply, there is no shortage of theories in circulation these days.
And Bob Errey, the former Penguins winger who now serves as analyst for their games on AT&T SportsNet, has one that figures to please the club's fan base.
"Some people might think an older team might be (adversely) affected, but if you're strong like Sidney Crosby and you're disciplined -- you're mentally sharp and you're a disciplined player, (committed) to your craft -- everybody is going to follow suit," he said. "So every team that has good leadership, I don't think there are any issues.
"Some people think a young team could just jump out of the gate, but I don't know if that's necessarily true. I would have thought that 20 years ago, that a veteran team couldn't come out (strong) because they were sitting for two months, doing nothing, but that's not the case anymore. It's a different league, a different business.
"Back in the day, an older team might have been affected more, because you just weren't as disciplined, off the ice, in terms of your training and the way you ate, those kinds of things. I think it's totally different now. I think a veteran team has that discipline, knows what it's going to take. A team that's been through it, like the Penguins, knows darned well that if they're not ready for the drop of the puck, it's going to be three games and out."
That's a feeling with which the Penguins are quite familiar, having been stampeded out of the playoffs by the New York Islanders in four games last spring.
Being on the wrong side of a sweep undoubtedly left a few psychological scars, but Errey believes that most humbling defeat also should stoke any competitive fires that might have been tamped down after the Penguins' Stanley Cup runs in 2016 and 2017.
"That Islanders series is fresh in their minds, " he said. "The playoffs are a different animal, and the Penguins' last playoff wasn't successful. If (they'd say) they're not still feeling some of the hurt from that, they'd be lying, because I'd still be feeling the pain of that loss."
Players such as Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang who have been part of the Penguins' core for more than a decade have exulted in championships and experienced the misery of being upset in the playoffs.
Although their window of opportunity probably won't close for a few more years, they surely realize by now that they will have a finite number of chances to chase another Cup. That presumably will further sharpen their focus and ratchet up their intensity as the Penguins' preliminary round series against Montreal approaches.
"Your chances are only limited as you get older," Errey said. "That's just the way it is."
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