Phanatic Hockey Editor
If noise possesses personality, if voices are able to carry venom, the entire sports complex and Xfinity Mobile Arena specifically, were dangerous places to be for Penguins players and supporters in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference quarterfinal.
They were a little more safe on the weekend after Game 4 when the Penguins flipped the script.
A sellout crowd, clad in orange and bent on mayhem while witnessing the club’s first true home playoff game in exactly 8 years, set the tone on Wednesday night as the hosts took a 3 games to none series edge.
The win, their first in 10 years on home ice in the postseason, was a textbook example of fan excitement feeding and influencing play on the ice and vice versa into a gigantic feedback loop.
"It was great to experience that again,” deadpanned Flyers captain Sean Couturier after his club’s 5-2 victory. “We’re happy, but I think we’re happy for the city, for the fans, they’ve supported us through the ups and the downs the last couple years.”
The chants, curses and epithets started as soon as Flyers fans spotted the sparse crowd of Penguins fans who dared cross any threshold: the parking lot, Xfinity Live, the XMA entrance. The wave of malevolence swelled before each team took warmups, then hit a crescendo between the announcement of the starting lineups and the drop of the puck.
We’re not looking for Shakespearean-level insults here. This is a hockey crowd, so guttermouth is appropriate.
Right on cue, they wished for rigorous carnal exploits to be visited on the visitors. Sidney Crosby and all the starters apparently performed similar actions to vacuum cleaners and then another round of well-wishes for violent intercourse emerged for Crosby in particular after his death-dive when Garnet Hathaway nicked his half-shield with the tip of his stick blade in the faceoff circle late in the first period.
Bryan Rust – of all things a graduate of that holiest of institutions just outside South Bend – sent things over the edge with 3:44 gone in the second period and the Penguins holding a 1-0 lead.
Responding to an obvious elbow thrown by Flyers combatant Travis Konecny during a netmouth scramble around Pens netminder Stuart Skinner, Rust simply lost his mind, tackling TK, throwing off his gloves and punching him repeatedly until Konecny’s reflex to gain some leverage while prone on the ice threw his hands up and his legs out. Upon repeated looks at replays, I saw none of the blatant kicking motion the other side suggested was so dirty.
Regardless of who started it, who did the most damage, or who finished it, the officiating crew, led by referee Francois Saint-Laurent, handled the situation poorly. And the feedback loop between fans and team kicked right in.
The resulting 10-minute recess, ending on the final decision to throw everyone on both sides on the ice into their respective penalty boxes, gave the already skeptical Philly crowd – on the precipice of seeing a third consecutive game with the calls weighted to their opponents – ample time to ramp up their emotion and sustain their complaints.
“We know what they’re about. We know what to expect,” Rust offered, implicating purpose on the part of the home squad and their fans to turn an NHL playoff game into a WWE spectacle. “We just gotta do a better job of managing those emotions.”
Again, the usual taunts did quite nicely. The zebras were no longer zebras but gaping donkeys rear ends. It didn't even matter that the call came from opposite ends of the stands and clashed in the middle. The meaning was crystal clear.
“I could sit here over a bunch of beers and tell you some stories from back in the day,” said Flyers head coach Rick Tocchet on Wednesday about that feedback loop in action, “I’ve lived it, I’ve seen it. For me, (the best part is) to see the young guys … seeing that crowd. It’s been a while.”
I’m going to stop short at the Penguins’ online camps’ assertion that “the crowd” somehow bullied the officials into giving the Flyers a power play from which they began to seize control of the contest. It’s the same nonsense Mister Snider used to cry about publicly when calls in Toronto and Montreal didn’t go the Flyers’ way half a century ago.
Besides, never attribute to maliciousness what can be defined as incompetence.
On the other hand, armed with a psychological edge of having nothing to lose in Saturday’s potential series-deciding game which ended up 4-2 in their favor, the Penguins opted to let their play do the talking and leave the extracurricular nonsense behind. The locals, always spoiling for a fight, weren’t as up for the challenge although the noise from a second straight sellout crowd was constant from warmups through the opening puck drop.
Sure, when the Pens scored first, again, in the first period and the goal scorer was Crosby, there was a momentary uptick of uproar that registered through the broadcast. And then, very little. Because the visitors executed the Flyers’ road gameplan in reverse.
Fans could have turned the tide just over a minute into the second period when the first major terrible decision for either side turned into a game-changing advantage for the visitors. Upon a dump-in by Rust, Flyers goaltender Dan Vladar handled the puck in the trapezoid behind his net and hilarity ensued:
After that goal which gave the Penguins a 2-0 edge … nothing … except disappointed whimpers from the partisans and punters. No loud, repeated bellowing of “Vladdy” like there had been during his two key stoppages the previous evening.
“It was my bad of hitting him,” Vladar said during Saturday’s postgame. “You do it in practice, you do it 20 times in a row, how many times (the puck goes past the forechecker) and it is what it is. Nobody’s perfect.”
A half generation ago that would have brought out ALL the Negadelphian boo-birds: the ones who reflexively protest an opposition goal, the ones upset at the team’s nominal MVP committing such an egregious error at a crucial time and the ones who just needed to vent when something managed to go Pittsburgh’s way.
Even when Denver Barkey redirected a Zegras feed on the doorstep to reduce the Flyers’ deficit to one later in the frame, the momentary burst of excitement only gave way to momentary bursts of the classic “LETS GO FLYERS” chant. The feedback loop simply didn’t exist.
And when Crosby won a board battle before Pens defenseman Kris Letang rifled home the eventual game-winner with less than 4 ½ minutes elapsed in the third period, no bangs, only whimpers from a throng more than 20,000 strong.
“I thought we were a little more poised. That stuff’s going to happen, it’s the playoffs,” Crosby offered in the postgame pool interview. “We just have to be a little bit more smart about it. Ultimately, we’ve got to save our energy for in between the whistles. That translated to the game and the way we played.”
Was it really ‘smart’ though when cameras caught Rust in the midst of a hair pull the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills couldn’t have executed better on Flyers rookie winger Porter Martone?
The Pens home crowd is bound to be infinitely more engaged on Monday night than in the first two games. The Flyers have the blueprint to quiet them and it’s up to the players to execute the plan. If not, there’s a third and probably final chance for the Philly faithful to exert their influence.
