One of the ongoing miracles of televised hockey is that Pierre McGuire, night after night, speaks and acts in his trademark, intensely bizarre way, and somehow manages to keep it in a vacuum.
Best guess: This happens because hockey players are superficially polite and, often, too deep into cliche-spewing autopilot mode for it to register. Yes, that was a weird thing to say, or a weird thing to do, but it's Pierre so ... whatever. Just let it go.
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Of course, it took Phil Kessel to finally call some attention to it. McGuire, after Pittsburgh's 4-2 win over Tampa Bay in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference final, chose to ask Kessel about his conditioning. For reasons known only to McGuire, he decided to phrase this as "How is your breath?"
Kessel responded as most normal people would.
Best Pierre interview ever. pic.twitter.com/tMhWsnmSyg
— Doc Emrick (@DocInRealLife) May 19, 2016
It provided a nice little pin on the night, and the latest, best act in hockey's most unnecessary image rehabilitation tour. Phil Kessel, laughing on TV after dominating a postseason game.
And it bears noting — right now, Kessel is performing in the way anyone paying attention always assumed he would. It's too soon to mention, but we'll do it anyway: If form holds, we're six Pittsburgh wins away from Kessel getting a whole bunch of Conn Smythe votes and taking a victory lap with the Stanley Cup. It'd be the most entertaining possible endgames for one of the highest-profile hockey sideshows in recent memory.
We've been over this before; Kessel is a very, very good hockey player, and it's a little tough to get a handle on anything beyond that. He doesn't like talking about himself. He can be standoffish and, worse, boring — but it's who he is, and who he further became after years in Toronto as the face of a franchise adrift. It couldn't matter less.
The Maple Leafs, all told, needed to trade him; they were at the start of a rebuild and he was their most valuable chip. Most of all, he'd spent six years as one of the faces of a depressing, terrible team located at the epicenter of the sport. It was time, and it all went down on July 1.
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The way it's been framed — not just in Toronto, but Pittsburgh — is that Kessel was some sort of reclamation project; the phrase "complementary piece" has been thrown around so often with Kessel that it's lost meaning. It's not false, either — he's a complementary piece in the relatively small task of dealing with media attention.
With hockey, though? With hockey, Kessel isn't a complementary piece. Play-driving fourth-liners who kill penalties are complementary pieces. Third-pairing d-men who can chip in on a second-unit power play are complementary pieces.
A guy who in his previous six seasons had the fifth-most goals in hockey is a primary piece. One of four active players to average at least a point per game in the playoffs? Primary piece. That's Phil Kessel, and that's who he's been so far in the postseason for Pittsburgh.
"Phil Kessel doesn't get near the respect he deserves," Lightning coach Jon Cooper said after the game.
He leads the Penguins and the Eastern Conference with 16 points (7G, 9A), and he was the best player on the ice in Game 2 — he didn't just score. He hit the crossbar another time and created a goal by Carl Hagelin by — gasp — backchecking.
“He was a machine all night," Hagelin said.
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So, that's why watching the postgame interview with McGuire was so great. Part of the reason there's so much cognitive dissonance with Kessel — the gap between the player he actually is, and the player too many believe him to be — comes from body language that is, at a base level, abysmal.
When the camera flashes to him on the bench between shifts, you're gonna see a lot of this:
Just found out the Penguins didn't make a #BestKessel t-shirt for him. pic.twitter.com/cqNZ6GVpVI
— Jen Neale (@MsJenNeale_PD) May 19, 2016
"That's just the way his face looks. That's just his face."
That's just the way Phil Kessel looks on the bench. That's just how Phil Kessel sits — and when he's scoring goals, you'll see even more of it; the camera finds those guys.
And, even though Kessel laughed (because bad breath is funny), it was instructive; the guy had just nearly willed his team to a playoff win on the ice, and he was answering weird, tangential questions about the way he comports himself off of it. Credit Pierre, though, because he recovered nicely.
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"It's been fun watching you," he said. "Keep having fun, Phil."
How could he not?