The Pittsburgh Penguins certainly had a disappointing finish to their 2014-15 season. A year that started with such hope and promise finished with a dizzying tail slide down the home stretch of the regular season and a first-round playoff exit at the hands of the New York Rangers.
The late-season slide showed that this Penguins club has many weaknesses, chiefly among them scoring goals. That demon reared its head in the playoffs as the Pens scored just one goal in each of their four first-round defeats.
As far as the Penguins seemed from being a complete team, their margin of victory in the playoffs was razor thing, losing all four games by just one goal.
“We had the chances; it could have gone either way,” said captain Sidney Crosby. “It’s unfortunate to get that result for how hard we worked.”
The Penguins’ hard work was evident in Game 5. The team’s lone goal came when Nick Spaling went crashing headfirst into the goal crease to hunt down a rebound. The Penguins hit, crashed and back-checked with reckless abandon on Friday night.
“Everyone played extremely hard,” Crosby added. “Flower gave us a chance to win every night. The way we worked in this series … they’re a good team with a lot of depth and we’re a goal here or there from being on a different side of it.”
Marc-Andre Fleury was indeed the team’s shining star in the postseason, keeping the team in every game despite a rag-tag blueline that included rookie Brian Dumoulin and Taylor Chorney, who were called up from Wilkes-Barre at the end of the regular season and saw their first NHL playoff action.
“We were missing a lot of defenseman for the playoffs,” Fleury said. “Everyone that was in battled hard and tried to give their best every night and give us a chance to hang in there.”
Despite Fleury being the player with perhaps the least blame on his shoulders for the team’s loss, he took the result harder than most.
“(We) hung in there,” said goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury. “I just thought, ‘It’s going to come. We’re going to get a bounce or something.’ It just never came.
“We played a good team. We hung in there every night, made it close, but at the end of the day, we still lost.”
The Penguins should hold their heads high in one regard: despite injuries, ineffective play by many of the team’s leaders, and an obvious difference in talent level between themselves and their opponent, the Penguins battled until the final whistle.
As hollow as a moral victory may feel while they’re packing their things for the summer, especially with many players unlikely to return to Pittsburgh for the 2015-16 campaign, the Penguins should be proud of their effort.
The 20 men who donned black and gold on Friday gave their best. It’s a shame that their best wasn’t good enough.
Photo credit: NHLI/Getty Images
