Apr 7, 2018 6 min read

The Penguins don’t have to win three Stanley Cups in a row.

They just have to win it this year. That they won the last two will have nothing to do with what happens between now and mid-June. The reason there have been very few repeat and three-peat NHL championships is because it’s really, really hard to win one.

The Penguins have won five of them but there was a 17-year gap between their second one and their third. Let’s remember how close the Penguins came to not even making it to the Final last year.

Remember Chris Kunitz’s double-overtime goal to beat Ottawa in Game 7? A bounce here or there and the Penguins are bounced out by a team that was blown up nine months later.

So, this playoff run by the Penguins has its own life and its own destiny. The team is good enough to win and, if it doesn’t, it won’t have anything to do with it being so hard to win three in a row and everything to do with how hard it is to win one.

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• ams are always cautioned about the danger of thinking there’s a switch you can flip for the playoffs to leave all of your deficiencies and bad habits behind and rightly so, but the Penguins are a team that, because of its recent playoff experience, might just have one of those switches. There are lots of players on this Penguins team who have been on multiple long Cup runs and know the difference between regular-season hockey and the playoffs better than anyone else.
• Casey DeSmith pitching a shutout for the Penguins over Ottawa Friday night was huge. Coach Mike Sullivan could have been severely second-guessed for not starting Matt Murray in goal if DeSmith had caused them to lose the game. Now, Murray has a rest and, just as importantly, DeSmith is a little less rusty if Murray gets hurt.
• Goaltending, as usual, will determine how far the Penguins go and Murray has to step it up. He’s given up at least three goals in eight of his last nine games and he’s given up four goals four times. That’s a 3.44 goals against average. His defense has let him down a lot lately, but there a lot of soft goals in there. Murray has a reputation for making his biggest saves at the biggest times, and he has two Stanley Cup rings to validate that reputation, and GAA can be misleading, but you can be pretty sure that if Murray has a 3.44 in his next five or six games the Penguins will be bounced out in Round 1.
• The Pirates couldn’t have picked a better time to get off to their best start in 42 years but don’t expect a good April or even a good May to prevent lots of empty seats at PNC Park. Tickets for early games were sold months ago and there’s way too much bitterness and skepticism to expect massive walk-up sales.
• Talk about Cal Ripken all you want. Phil Kessel playing five consecutive seasons without missing a game is amazing. I mean, it’s hockey.
• So is the Penguins selling out every game for 11 years. Those tickets aren’t cheap.
• The shirts-off-our-backs ceremony that the Penguins do after the last home game of the season is a brilliant promotion. Friday night it was obvious that the Penguins were actually enjoying handing their game jerseys to fans. If they weren’t, they did a great job of acting like they were and that’s just as good. It shows what’s always been apparent with hockey players. They get it. Ask anyone in the media which players among the four major sports are the most accessible and accommodating.
• I would rather do a sitdown interview with retiring PNC Park usher Phil Coyne than anybody in the Pirates organization. He turns 100 April 27th and was ushering at Forbes Field when Joe DiMaggio was a rookie.
• Only a bad golfer would suggest that it doesn’t take athleticism to shoot in the mid-60s at Augusta National.
• Matt Cassell signed to play quarterback for the Detroit Lions last week. It’s his seventh team. He went 11-5 in his only season as a starter with the Patriots. Since then he’s 26-40. Team sport.
• When a baseball team decides to play a game in a blizzard, as the Pirates did Wednesday night, it owes ticket buyers a chance at a rain check. A fan, who buys a ticket for a stupidly scheduled night game April 4 should be able to count on the team not playing in hideous weather. By playing the game and not offering a refund, the team is telling the ticket buyer he/she has two choices – show up and be miserable or stay home and eat the price of the ticket. It’s total disrespect for the customer. And the lesson would be not to buy tickets in advance for a night game in early April.
• The Idiots Who Run Baseball made up for the stupidity of having two northern teams play each other at night April 4 by scheduling the Minnesota Twins as the visitors. They only come to Pittsburgh once and that makes it even more likely that the game is played, no matter the weather.
• I would rather do a sitdown interview with Phil Coyne than any other person in Majo
• r League Baseball.