Is the pressure on Pittsburgh's defense?

The thing that has really bugged me so far is one simple fact: Why is Alexander Ovechkin being allowed to roam open ice? It seems like he always has far too much free space when he’s in our defensive zone, and it always comes back to bite us.

I was craving for Kunitz, or anyone, to blast him just so he can get beaten and worn down that fractional margin which meant someone else needs to pick up the pace for the Capitals. I’m not saying cheap shot, I’m not saying just punch him or blind side him, but someone needs to level him, or keep checking him.

Best case scenario is if we took a page from the Red Wings camp, in how they negated Rick Nash, and take him away from any offensive chance by smothering his area of the ice.

Bottle up center ice, and get that same fire from early on in the Flyers series where we smacked people around.

footnote, I thought Sykora had some great opportunities in last night’s game. Perhaps he’ll come around, but I still wonder if he’s even 90% healthy.

I know I bring up my allegiance to the Devil an awful lot around here, but I’m going to do it again when I tell you to trust me when I say that, having watched the Devils field some of the best defense corps in recent hockey history, the Penguins are about as defensively sound a team as it is possible to be in the league’s newest post-lockout incarnation. Brooks Orpik and Rob Scuderi do not have the palpable ferocity of legendary defensive defenseman Scott Stevens (I sometimes wonder who would win in a creepy glaring contest between Orpik and Stevens, though I usually go with Stevens, just because I’m still terrified of him even though he’s been retired for, like, five years) or Ken Daneyko, and Sergei Gonchar and Kris Letang cannot provide both shutdown defense and timely offensive production from the blueline like the way Scott Niedermayer and Brian Rafalski did (and still do).

However, the Pens ‘D’ was not designed with the single minded purpose to literally batter, frustrate and ultimately shut down the opposing team’s offense before it even got within sniffing distance of Martin Brodeur’s goal crease. It was designed to allow as few scoring chances as it could on Marc-Andre Fleury with the knowledge that if they can limit the opposing team to scoring three goals or less, they have enough firepower at the forward position to outscore the other team for the victory. And while this is not necessarily a bad game plan, it does require each and every player, from the goaltender to the defensemen to the forwards, to do his part.

Now unfortunately for the Penguins four out of the five goals they have scored in this series against Washington have been scored by Sidney Crosby. Ideally, the Penguins defense and goaltending are such that at this time of year they should give up no more than two goals per game. However, none of that really matters if Penguins not named Sidney Crosby cannot find ways to put the puck in the net more than two or three times per game because the Penguins defense and goaltending are not built to 1-0 or 2-1 it to the Stanley Cup the way Devils did all those years.