NHL Playoffs 2012: How Penguins Can Rally from 2-Game Deficit Against Flyers

Just because a team looks terrible in the first two games of the Stanley Cup playoffs doesn't mean it's dead yet. 

If there is one word to describe Pittsburgh's performance in their quarterfinals series against the Flyers, it's "terrible." The Penguins can't seem to do anything right. They stake a lead and they can't hold on to it. They fall behind and they can't catch up. No matter what the Penguins do, the Flyers have a better answer. 

In Game 1 of the series, Pittsburgh took a 3-0 lead after the first period and managed to cough it up and lose 4-3 in overtime on home ice. While the Flyers talked about how they played their best when they played desperate, the Penguins desperately tried to figure out what went wrong—and they couldn't before Game 2, which somehow went even worse than the first. 

On Friday night, the Penguins had a 2-0 lead, a 3-1 lead, a 4-3 lead and a 5-4 lead, and none of them lasted. The end result? An 8-5 home loss and a 2-0 series deficit. 

But flailing out of the gates doesn't mean this Pittsburgh team is no longer a Stanley Cup contender. 
First and foremost, the Penguins are too talented a team to slink off the ice in this series without even putting up a fight. They're headlined by the league's leading scorer, who had 50 goals and 59 assists in 2011-12. In two games against Philadelphia this season, Sidney Crosby has two goals and two assists.

The Penguins were the top-scoring team in the NHL this season, and Marc-Andre Fleury had the league's second-most wins. Sometimes it just takes a while for these things to come together. The offensive weapons are putting the puck in the net; the Penguins just need to find a way to prevent the defenses lapses that have killed them so far. 

A comeback, at this point, is far from impossible. Last season, the eventual-champion Bruins dropped the first two games of their quarterfinals series at home to the Canadiens, and arguably, their situation was worse than the Penguins'; they scored just once in those two games. 

But once they got to Montreal, they found their stride. They scored 11 goals in the next three games and won in overtime three times in the next four. They looked like a dead team, but they were far from it. 

And who can forget the Flyers team that fell behind 3-0 to the Bruins in the conference semifinals in 2010, only to come all the way back and pin a massive collapse on Boston? 

The Penguins have proven this season that they, too, are resilient enough to reverse their fortunes when all the chips are down. After a six-game losing streak that stretched from the end of December into early January, they responded with eight straight wins—including four straight in overtime—and in February, they embarked on an 14-game unbeaten streak. 

The Penguins, like the Flyers, just need to remember how it feels to play with some desperation. As the Flyers have proven, there's nothing more dangerous than a desperate team, and now it's time for Pittsburgh to reverse those roles.