Pittsburgh Penguins right winger Phil Kessel celebrates after scoring a goal against the Washington Capitals on Tuesday.Charles LeClaire
For months, the Phil Kessel experiment in Pittsburgh looked like a dud.
He skated with Sidney Crosby. He shifted to Evgeni Malkin's wing. But, like a lot of the lineup, he wasn't scoring. Kessel had 20 points in his first 36 games, and the Penguins were sputtering – out of a playoff spot and on pace for their worst season in a decade.
Then came the coaching change, and a system change, and more line changes. When Kessel finally landed with Carl Hagelin and Nick Bonino out of desperation in mid-March when Malkin went down with an injury, he took off. They all did.
The Penguins are 22-5-0 ever since, including 8-3 in the playoffs after dusting off the Washington Capitals on Tuesday. Kessel, the hero in Game 6's overtime win, has better than a point a game – 11 goals and 17 assists – in that span, putting him fourth in scoring among all players league-wide.
This was what Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford envisioned when he landed the winger in a blockbuster deal with the Toronto Maple Leafs back on July 1.
He simply had to wait.
"When Malkin got hurt and we were into real important games to make the playoffs, Phil really stepped up," Rutherford said.
"He's as good a playmaker in the game as there is. Everybody views him as a goal scorer – they judge him on that – but he has made some great plays at critical times in games all year long. Very important times where he set someone up to score. His playmaking is exceptional."
Kessel's latest great play put Pittsburgh through to the third round for only the second time since their Stanley Cup win in 2009. Kessel collected the puck below the goal line in the corner and deftly made a hard, precise pass onto Hagelin's stick in the slot.
Hagelin shot. Bonino scored on the rebound.
Goodbye to a Capitals team that had one of the highest regular-season point totals in NHL history.
"They're not forcing anything," Rutherford said of what's become the league's most dangerous line the past two months (with a combined 29 goals in 27 games). "They've just kind of meshed together, and they go with the game."
A big part of what's made the Penguins so hard to handle of late is they're a matchup nightmare. The Capitals lost the series in six games despite holding Crosby to no goals and two assists. Malkin had only two points.
In other years, that would have been Pittsburgh's undoing. In this one, Kessel's line outshone the Capitals second unit and produced half of the goals scored by Penguins forwards in the series.
In a league in which the salary cap has made it hard to cobble together three or four scoring threats on the same team, the Penguins seem to have a half dozen at any given time, and they're sprinkled throughout their lineup.
That was Rutherford's rationalization when Kessel became available last summer. Getting the deal done with the Leafs wasn't easy, he explained, with a lot of moving parts. But, in the end, Pittsburgh gave up only two middling prospects (Kasperi Kapanen and Scott Harrington) and what will now be a very late first-round pick. They also forced the Leafs to eat 15 per cent of Kessel's mammoth deal, leaving them with $1.2-million in dead salary all the way until 2022.
While the merits of the trade will be debated in Toronto for years, it does appear, almost a year later, to be a deal that benefited both sides.
Pittsburgh, with Crosby and Malkin at what could be the tail end of their primes, is getting another shot at a championship, with a team that is a legitimate contender in part because of Kessel's ability to break a game open.
The Leafs, without Kessel to score 30, couldn't buy a goal most of the year, which allowed them to sink into the NHL basement, win the draft lottery and get a teenager superstar who can step into their lineup next season. They also cleared plenty of cap space, which may allow them to sign a younger star in the years to come.
Winning in the NHL has become all about finding your window to win. While Leafs president Brendan Shanahan knew his team was years away and an aging Kessel didn't fit the puzzle, Rutherford believed he did.
Kessel may be 28, and his game may yet fade when he hits his 30s, but the past few months have made clear it hasn't yet. As he continually makes great plays in big moments, the heat he took in Toronto for not being able to lift a mess of a roster to greater heights seems more misplaced than ever.
He is an integral part of what makes the Penguins look like they can win it all.
"I felt fine with this deal from Day 1," Rutherford said. "It's hard to find guys that can score goals or set them up. If it's not happening every game, I guess some people think it should. That's not the way sports works. We did what we needed to do where our team is. Toronto did what they needed to do with what they're trying to do.
"I really like how [Kessel] has fit into the team. We have top players – the best player in the game – but we also have a team concept. Phil's bought into that right from the start. So I like how he's fit into the team. The rest of the stuff? You see it on the ice."