Apr 25, 2015 5 min read

One goal.

You can’t blame it on Marc-Andre Fleury this time. Or last time, for that matter.

The team with the two players who averaged the most and the seventh-most points per game in the regular season was held to one goal four times in five games and, for the last six weeks of the regular season, was the second-lowest scoring team in the NHL.

That’s not the way it was supposed to work for the Penguins.

And the Sidney Crosby-Evgeni Malkin window closes a little more.

So, now what?

Fire the coach and general manager? Tried that.

Is it a stretch to suggest that having Kris Letang and/or Ollie Matta carrying the puck out of their defensive end might have meant a goal or two for the Penguins in the series with the Rangers? Not really.

Put another way, would the New York Rangers have been a little easier to score on if they had been missing Dan Girardi and Ryan McDonagh, two of their three best defensemen?

No doubt.

The 2014-15 season for the Penguins will be remembered for the injuries. The team was supposed to be constructed to be better in the playoffs and, despite losing in five games, a case could be made, based on the defense and the penalty killing, that it was a better playoff team.

If it had been healthy.

Crosby spent way too much time digging for pucks and looking for a winger or a trailing defenseman who could put the puck in the net.

Lots of work to do between now and October.

• Baseball is not cool.

How do I know this? Comedian Chris Rock says so in a seven-minute rant on this month’s edition of HBO’s Real Sports, which might be the best sports show on television.

And why is baseball not cool? According to Rock, it’s too white.

Rock says that, as a black baseball fan, he is an endangered species. He talks about loving the Mets when he was a kid, but, “When I ask another black guy if he saw the Mets game last night, the answer I gets is, ‘What’s a Met?”

He has statistics to back up his contention that baseball is dying – Little League participation is down 20 percent since 1995 and TV ratings for the World Series are down 50 percent, and five out of six people who watch baseball are white and the average age is 53. In America, 4.62 people out of six are white.

Rock laments the fact that only eight percent of Major League Baseball players are African-American and the team that won the World Series last year – the San Francisco Giants – had none.

“It’s the game. It’s old-fashioned and stuck in the past. You got white-haired white guy announcers. Baseball likes to look back.”

He says the antique stadiums that popped up around the country don’t exactly remind black people of the good ole days.

So what’s Rock’s solution?

“Baseball needs us. Fact is, black America decides what is hot and what young people get excited about.”

Rock doesn’t like baseball’s boring code of no undue celebrating. He uses video to show that bat-flipping after a home run is an “art form” in Korean baseball. He says that in American baseball, “don’t look too happy about it.”

He compares baseball’s unwillingness to celebrate to the NFL and shows a few players making idiots of themselves after touchdowns. All of the dancing football players are black, of course.

Maybe the code is a white thing more than it’s a baseball thing. Choreographed celebrations in hockey tend to be frowned upon, too.

There aren’t a lot of white NFL players who play the fool for entertainment purposes. Or as Jim Brown, possibly the NFL’s greatest player and a founding father of the black pride movement in the 1960s, says, ” That’s embarrassing to me. To think in this day and age, these young men would be out there shaking their butts and not knowing much of anything else. Not knowing the dignity of a man and how to play a game and play it hard and let that speak for yourself.”

Rock thinks baseball needs to stop being so white in order to save itself from extinction.

Imagine the response if a white man, comedian or otherwise, said he was losing interest in the NFL because it’s not white enough. Sixty-eight percent of the players in the NFL are black.

Rock probably doesn’t know it but he’s promoting one of the most insidious causes of racial discrimination – the soft bigotry of low expectations.

White players are expected to act like they’ve been in the end zone before, but black players are expected to show, as Brown says, “The buffoonery. The things we fought to get away: The stereotypical gestures. The rolling of the eyes, the dancing, and all the Walt Disney stereotypical disgraces,” when they get there.

Remember when Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, who is biracial, was reported to be considered “not black enough” by his teammates? There might not be a more respectful, humble, intelligent superstar athlete in America than Wilson, who, by the way, has the NFL’s No. 1-selling jersey.

Rock apparently agrees with Wilson’s teammates and believes he’s better suited for baseball.

Wilson played in the minor leagues while he was in college. On ESPN Radio, Wilson said, “There’s a great correlation between baseball and football, especially in terms of playing quarterback. The mental focus you have to have with one play at a time and being in the moment. It really prepares you mentally.”

Rock might need to adjust his focus.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.