Mark Spector

PITTSBURGH - The National Hockey League overhauled its game during the lockout of 2004-05, but only now is that pruned tree bearing the kind of fruit the league had hoped to see. Suddenly the game is lightning fast, the whistles are few, and the on-ice product is better than it has been for years.

Around that lockout, the Pittsburgh Penguins drafted Evgeni Malkin second overall in 2004 and Sidney Crosby first overall in ‘05. Then they set out to build a team that could challenge for a Stanley Cup one day.

Today, just 13 playoff games into their evolution from a small market doormat to a new economy power, the Pittsburgh Penguins are the favorite to represent the Eastern Conference in the 2008 Stanley Cup finals.

“A lot of people still think that we’re a young team,” said 28-year-old winger Ryan Malone, a Pittsburgh native. “We are, but these wins are just making us grow as a team, making us mature as a team. It’s happening slowly but surely.”

Surely, yes. But slowly? Of that we’re not so sure.

The Penguins are exactly what NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was hoping for when a game that had devolved into glorified rodeo on skates shut down for the lockout of 2004-05. The NHL was coming off of a 2004 Stanley Cup finals in which every single game was won by the team that scored the game’s first goal.

What that mean was that, as soon as one team gained the lead, they would simply stop trying to score goals and rely on the hooking, holding and obstruction that had come to characterize hockey — particularly at playoff time.

So the league aimed to free up the skilled players, right about the same time the Penguins were finishing last and enjoying some prime draft picks as a result.

And now?

“You look at their team,” said an admiring Brendan Shanahan, shortly after his New York Rangers were ousted in five games by Pittsburgh in Round 2. “They’ve got a lot of top, top picks who are ... playing into their prime years. And their coach has done a good job giving a system to play.”

It is not all flash dash in Pittsburgh, however. They also have plenty of grit, the sandpaper necessary to smooth one’s trip through the NHL’s postseason.

“Their team doesn’t get enough credit for their defensive zone coverage and their shot blocking skills,” Shanahan said. “The story, I think, in at least two of the games [of the Rangers series], was their ability to get in front of our shots and not let our point shots get through.”

If we have gleaned anything from the fact they have won two playoff rounds this spring in a tidy nine games, it is that they are miles ahead of the team that lost in Round 1 to Ottawa a year ago.

As the Penguins ready for an all-Pennsylvania Eastern Conference finals against the Philadelphia Flyers, the exercise of finding holes in this Penguins lineup is not the simple task it once was. They’ve got undoubtedly the best one-two punch down the middle in Crosby and Malkin — and the best one-two-three punch when you factor in 19-year-old center Jordan Staal.

On the right side of each of their top two lines, the Pens have snipers of a high pedigree in Marian Hossa and Petr Sykora. The grit and penalty killing is there with wingers like Pascal Dupuis, Jarkko Ruutu, and a quick, industrious ‘04 draft pick named Tyler Kennedy. You want to fight? Meet Georges Laraque, the consensus No. 1 heavyweight in hockey.

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