Boston Bruins on Paper: Free Clinic

The Pittsburgh Penguins ended up at the free clinic on Monday night.

The place was packed, filled with 18,000 of their closest friends, yet it was oddly quiet.  But despite the staggering number of people waiting to be seen, the Penguins were called into the office just 28 seconds after their arrival, and the diagnosis was not good.

The Penguins have no heart.

You don’t have to be a cardiologist or a doctor of Journalism to make that call – in fact, though no manner of ology exists that specializes in abnormalities of the hearts of champions, the symptoms are not difficult to recognize – and all were on full display at the Consol Energy Arena last evening…

The free clinic was provided and sponsored by the Boston Bruins – philanthropists that the are – and what a clinic it was, blowing out the Penguins on their home ice to take a 2-0 lead in their best of seven Eastern Conference Finals series.

The Bruins manhandled the Penguins, beating them on the forecheck, beating them on the backcheck, beating them in the neutral zone…and not just in the physical sense, a pasting like Monday night’s 6-1 debacle can leave a team demoralized and with esteem issues, particularly on the heels of Saturday night’s 3-0 punking…

…because in the space of 28 seconds, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ collective image went from “a better team than we showed on Saturday night” to the very same squad that foolishly tried to beat the Bruins at their own brutal game and got taken behind the woodshed for their efforts – and it only got worse as the game wore on.

Brad Marchand scored that first goal of the game, appropriately taking advantage of a miscue by the villainous man-child Sidney Crosby who took a half-hearted swipe at a bouncing puck at the center line, completely whiffing, then watching helplessly as the little ball of hate ruined his night less than half a minute in…

Nathan Horton and David Krejci (who else) followed suit and the Penguins’ heartbeats became irregular – but when Brandon Sutter beat Boston net minder Tuukka Rask on a very Penguin-esque fast break goal, it was like a first responder hit them with the paddles, the beat getting stronger, the crowd growing louder…

…and that’s when Marchand sank an absolute dagger right into their hearts with his second goal of the game just 30 seconds after Sutter’s life-saving attempt,  a flat line the result – and it was only the first intermission.  There was 40 minutes of hockey left to play, but the Penguins were unconscious and missed it.

But in reality, the Penguins have a heartbeat – and therefore a heart – but metaphorically they are in very serious condition, and if they can’t figure out the Boston Bruins by Wednesday night, they will be downgraded to critical…

…and the only thing after that is a dirt nap, so finding the remedy in the next three days is of grave urgency if the Penguins want to live to see the weekend.

Fortunately, there’s help – but to form a baseline one must have more than the two dim samples to determine a course of action and a therapeutic regimen, particularly for such a heavily favored team.  If Pittsburgh can put up a fight in Boston on Wednesday night, win or not, a case can be made for the Penguins as just having an acute case of the yips.

But what we saw in the final two periods of Game 2 was most assuredly not the yips, rather, a chronic case of running up against the most physical team in the league and trying to go toe-to-toe with them, which afforded Boston the opportunity to adopt the style of a mean counter puncher – and they delivered a stunning knockout blow.

So…what can Pittsburgh do to climb back in this series?  Simply, try to beat Boston – in Boston, no less – by playing the game that got them to the conference finals, the style that beat the Bruins thrice in the regular season, the style that got them past the Islanders and Senators in the previous rounds…

…because if they keep trying to beat the Bruins at their own game, the diagnosis will be of chronic foolishness and they may have to admitted, if not quarantined…but certainly eliminated.

Why?  Because nobody plays Bruins hockey like the Bruins – and to even try indicates some sort of deep rooted crisis of confidence, and that’s a bad way to fly, even for a flightless bird.