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PITTSBURGH — One year removed from their first exposure to the NHL playoffs, Sidney Crosby and Marc-André Fleury are willing to admit they were wide-eyed innocents at the time.
"For the first 10 minutes in Game 1, it felt like they had eight guys out there," Crosby said yesterday. "It was just one of those things where we were just watching, trying to feel it out, and they weren't. They were taking the play to us."
Fleury, 23, three years Crosby's senior, was in the Pittsburgh Penguins net and bore the brunt of his teammates' playing spectators.
"The intensity, right from the beginning to the last minute of the last game," Fleury said, still marvelling a year later. "You know, sometimes during the regular season, there are slow moments. You know what I mean. [In the playoffs], it keeps going, keeps going. It was fun to be part of it. It is something else, something you've got to live."
The "they" Crosby referred to were the Ottawa Senators, who disposed of the young, green Penguins in five games.
Now the Senators and Penguins are preparing to meet again in the Eastern Conference quarter-finals, starting tonight, under vastly different circumstances. This time, it is the Senators who wobbled into the playoffs because of various problems, from goaltending to scoring to injuries. It is the Penguins who have the home advantage, thanks to their 105 points in the regular season.
The Penguins are a little older, wiser and, if not battle-hardened, then much tougher. The addition of veterans Hal Gill on defence and Marian Hossa and Petr Sykora up front, the emergence of Evgeni Malkin as a star and the return to health of Gary Roberts make a big difference.
However, there is at least one similarity to last year. After the Penguins lost, it was revealed that Crosby played the entire series with a broken foot. This time, he is officially healthy, but is going into the playoffs having missed 28 games with a high ankle sprain.
The superstar centre was also held out of the final game of the regular season, which Senators general manager and head coach Bryan Murray accused the Penguins of losing on purpose to force a playoff match with the ailing Senators.
However, Murray is a sly veteran of the NHL coaching wars who knows he has to fire up his team, which is missing Daniel Alfredsson, the engine of its offence, along with fellow centres Mike Fisher and Chris Kelly because of injuries.
The comments that really had tongues wagging in the Penguins dressing room yesterday came from a columnist in the Ottawa Sun. This poor fellow embarrassed himself and his employer by opining that someone on the Senators should take a two-handed swing with his stick on Crosby's vulnerable ankle. Just in case the Senators should be as frightfully dim as his column, the scribe helpfully pointed out in capital letters it was Crosby's right ankle.
"It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened," Crosby said. "Teams obviously read injury reports. If a guy has a bad shoulder, I'm sure you're not going to ease up on him and not hit him. Whether or not deliberately do it? Who knows, but that's why the refs are out there, to police the game and make sure that stuff doesn't happen."
As for his ankle, Crosby says he missed Sunday's game only to rest for the playoffs. "The ankle is giving me no problems whatsoever," he said.
When it comes to problems, the Penguins hope to give the Senators all they can handle by putting last year's experience to work. They also learned much by dealing with the absence of Crosby as well as Fleury, who missed three months with his own ankle sprain.
Roberts, 41, admitted it took his youthful teammates some time to learn how to deal with heightened expectations this season. The Penguins started slowly, but caught fire while Crosby was out to rise to the upper echelon of the Eastern Conference.
"This team, through a lot of adversity, really stuck together this season," Roberts said. "And for me, personally, to watch this team play over the last three months has been a real treat. Everybody chipped in, everybody did their job.
"Mentally, I think we're a stronger team this time around just because of what we went through in the playoffs last year and the adversity that we went through this season to finish second in the conference."
