How Mike Sullivan's Magic Took the Penguins from Underachievers to Champions

SAN JOSE, Calf. — There are a million guys from the Boston area nicknamed "Sully," some who don't even have the last name of Sullivan. Sully guys have wicked Massachusetts accents, wear backward baseball caps and might utter a curse word or two. They drive beater cars and wear Celtics painters hats from the Larry Bird glory days and know the difference between a clam and a quahog. 

Then there's Mike Sullivan, who is as far from the stereotypical Sully guy as one can get. 

Sullivan has the wicked Massachusetts accent, but it ends there. The head coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins is a serious man, especially about the sport that has been his whole life. On Sunday night, he completed a six-month turnaround of the Penguins that probably should be given a chapter in some how-to book on coaching.

On Dec. 12 of last year, Penguins management called upon Sullivan to replace Mike Johnston as the team's head coach, with the 15-10-3 Penguins on the outside of the playoff bracket. They seemed like a miscast roster of high-salaried fading stars and no-name castoffs and were now being led by a guy who hadn't been a full-time NHL head coach since 2006, when his hometown Boston Bruins fired him.

Where Johnston and Dan Bylsma had failed since 2010 to get the Penguins back to a Stanley Cup Final, the doggedly determined Sullivan stepped in and got Pittsburgh's top stars—especially captain Sidney Crosby—to buy in on a plan to reinvent themselves as two-way, 200-foot players.

Eric Risberg/Associated Press

When Sullivan came in with fresh eyes to an organization that seemed tired, he saw players such as Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang who still had all the skill in the world, but who had gotten away from the discipline needed to be winners. Sullivan saw a bunch of talented players, but he didn't see a true team.

So he set out to get everyone to think collectively rather than individually.

"The one thing we tried to do was create an identity and establish an identity. I thought as the head coach, it was my responsibility to direct that," Sullivan said after Sunday's Cup-clinching Game 6 Penguins victory in San Jose.

"So we look at our personnel. When we looked at the type of players we have, our core guys, we think we've got players that want to play fast. They can all really skate, when you look at Crosby and Malkin and [Phil] Kessel and Letang, [Carl] Hagelin we acquired down the stretch. Our core guys, they can all really skate.

"They want to play fast. They want to come through the neutral zone with speed. We tried to implement a game plan that allowed them to play to their strengths. So we tried to create an identity."

To play the way they wanted, Sullivan warned them, they would have to work harder at getting the puck away from the other guys. That meant back-checking harder, thinking harder about being in the right positions away from the puck and communicating better as a five-man defensive unit. 

"As I've said to them all along, I know our team is going to score goals. In order to win championships, you got to keep it out of your net," said Sullivan, 48. "You have to become a team that is stingy defensively. Everybody has to buy in to that idea for us to get to where we want to go."

Crosby, the captain, the superstar, had to buy in or else nothing Sullivan said would have mattered. Some time around March, Crosby said, he began to see the true potential of what Sullivan had been preaching.

Jessica Rinaldi/Getty Images

"It took some time. Didn't happen overnight. But March was a big month for us," Crosby said. "We knew we had to get a big push to get in the playoffs. We knew once you get in the playoffs, anything can happen. We were playing good at the right time."

Still, it almost blew up for Pittsburgh during the Eastern Conference Final against Tampa Bay. In Game 5, Sullivan gambled and lost by starting rusty Marc-Andre Fleury in goal with the series tied 2-2. After the Penguins lost in overtime, they went to Tampa for Game 6 facing elimination, with Sullivan having to revert to rookie Matt Murray in goal. 

It was the one time in the playoffs that Sullivan looked a little too desperate and scripted, and he almost paid for it with a premature exit. If that had happened, there would be little in the way of a guarantee he would return as head coach. But starting with a 5-2 victory in Game 6 in which Crosby scored the game-winner, the Penguins again became the tougher, stingier defensive team Sullivan wanted.

Even though they needed six games to beat the Sharks in the Stanley Cup Final, the series felt lopsided almost the whole time. By the third period of Game 6, Sullivan's team looked masterful on defense. San Jose, a desperate team down a goal entering the third period of a closeout game on home ice, could muster only two shots in the final 20 minutes.

By the end, Crosby sounded fully converted to a new way of thinking about the game under Sullivan.

"There's more to just winning games than scoring goals," Crosby said. "It feels great, it's important. That's what our job is. But there's a lot of other things that go into it. Just making sure that you don't sacrifice all those other things to push for a goal here or there, that was the biggest thing.

"We had trust and confidence whoever it needed to be was going to make that big play, whether it was a goal, a save, a power play."

This is actually Sullivan's second straight Stanley Cup. He won a ring last year as the director of player development for the Chicago Blackhawks, the first season since retiring as a player with Phoenix in 2002 that he hadn't spent behind the bench as either a head coach or an assistant. 

Now, the guy who spent nearly 10 years between head coaching jobs in the NHL is the hottest coach in the league. His time in the wilderness is over. Now, he's a Stanley Cup-champion head coach.

As they would say back home in Massachusetts, that's wicked awesome.

Adrian Dater covers the NHL for Bleacher Report.