Penguins must find the fine line between physicality and stupidity

During the regular season, Penguins’ defenseman Brooks Orpik and forwards Matt Cooke and Chris Kunitz hovered near the top of the NHL’s hitting leader board.

Orpik was second in the league with 309, Cooke fifth with 262, and Kunitz sixteenth with 207 body checks. The numbers have been well-documented in Pittsburgh hockey circles.

For their upcoming series against the Washington Capitals, the Penguins will face a team loaded with offensive talent, and perhaps more importantly, tremendous potency on the power play.

In hockey, the most common way to put the opposition on the “manpower advantage,” as Washington play by play announcer, Joe Beninati would say, is to overstep the game’s rules while hitting.

This could pose a problem for the Penguins.

You see, the best way to shut down Alexander Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, Mike Green, and Alexander Semin, is to put them on their backside and take away their speed and poise through hard hitting.

When the Caps are laid out on the ice, they’re not scoring goals.

However, in the cases of Orpik, Cooke, and Kunitz, their eagerness to play so physically has resulted in a substantial amount of penalties against all three of them.

Cooke is second on the team in penalty minutes behind only enforcer Eric Godard. Orpik and Kunitz aren’t far behind at sixth and seventh on the team.

Physicality is a double edged sword when facing a team like the Capitals. If the Penguins don’t play physically, the team in red will dance around them like pylons and torch Marc-Andre Fleury. If they do decide to muscle up, they run the risk of taking penalties if they aren’t careful while doing it. This means keep the arms down, stay away from the head, and don’t clutch and grub.

Taking penalties against the Capitals will also equate to goals against. Their power play ranked fifth in the NHL during the regular season, and it was fairly solid in the first round against the best penalty killing team in the league, the New York Rangers.

Kunitz and Cooke need to tenderize Green at every opportunity that arises, and Orpik best keep Ovechkin and Semin in the crosshairs at all times. Still, it is essential that they play clean in the process.

Penalties after the whistle aren’t going to cut it, either.

The Pens need to walk a fine line between playing physical and playing stupid, or the Caps will embarrass them.