A LOT OF truths tend to get told when game follows game follows game, every other night, for as long as the mathematics allow. Flaws are exposed and excellence is revealed, but it isn't that, not exactly.
Mostly, a best-of-seven series is where preconceptions go to die. In this one, gone now is the notion that the Pittsburgh Penguins are all about Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, that they are superstars driving a lightly populated bus.
This is so wrong.
The Penguins are a team, in every sense.
The Flyers probably knew it all along - and now that they are down by 3-0 in the Eastern Conference finals, they are not likely to forget. However and whenever it ends, tonight or thereafter, the Flyers and the people who follow them and the people who have watched the Penguins in this series, and all spring, have been left with an enduring impression of skill and teamwork coming at them in black-clad waves.
And defense. The Penguins' defense really is the story of this series - team defense, persistent defense, real strength and sureness with the puck. We can talk about Malkin and Crosby, and they do have scary skill. We can talk about their speed and their explosiveness because it is all very real.
But defense is winning these games. Commitment to a system, an entire team-wide mind-set, is what the Penguins are using to crush the Flyers.
"To be a winner, it's tough," said Michel Therrien, the Penguins coach. "It's demanding to be a winner. I believe right now we are starting to be recognized as winners."
Prohibitive favorites now against the Flyers, the Penguins practiced yesterday at the Wachovia Center and said all the stuff you're supposed to say when you are up 3-0 in a series. I mean, who would have guessed that the Flyers would be desperate tonight and that the fourth win was the toughest? I had never heard that one before.
The Penguins have been attending to every detail. Take this whole trap business. That the Penguins have been doing it, trapping in the neutral zone, in bigger and bigger stretches of games, is clear enough. It should not shock anybody because it remains a winning strategy, even in the new NHL.
It is just that, given the advance billing, given Crosby, given Malkin, given the rock-'em sock-'em robots nature of most of the Flyers-Penguins games this season, the delicate art of strangling the life out of your opponent did not seem as if it would be a featured part of the playbook. But here we are.
