The way Kris Letang sees it, “screaming in the media” wouldn’t put Evgeni Malkin back in the Pittsburgh Penguins lineup against the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday night.
So he didn’t.
And neither did any of his teammates.
Reaction was largely muted to the news that Malkin would have to serve a one-game suspension for swinging his stick at the head of Philadelphia Flyers forward Michael Raffl on Monday night.
“I didn’t really have a reaction,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “The league makes the decisions and it doesn’t really matter what I think or you think or the rest of us think. The league makes their decisions and we’re going to live by it.”
In a perfect world, captain Sidney Crosby said, Malkin would have retaliated to a gloved punch he took in the back of the head from Raffl in a different way, but he knows that’s not always possible.
“It’s an emotional game,” Crosby said. “You’re going to do stuff sometimes. Ideally you wouldn’t do anything but skate away, but I’m sure there are a lot of guys, myself included, that have said that a number of times and it doesn’t always work out that way.”
