NHL elite tough on Thrashers

The Thrashers sure look like a streaky team: five consecutive regulation losses, followed by five consecutive victories, followed by two victories in 13 games.

But look behind those numbers and you see that when the Thrashers play matters far less than whom the Thrashers play. They’re an out-of-their-league 1-12-2 against teams that woke up Wednesday ranked in the top seven in each conference. They’re a more-than-competitive 9-4-2 against everyone else.

Those numbers suggest hard times for the home team tonight when the Pittsburgh Penguins visit. The Penguins, 2008 Stanley Cup finalists, are one of the top seven teams in the East. They won 3-2 the last time they came to Atlanta, on Nov. 20.

If the Thrashers are going to climb into the playoff chase, they have to start winning games like this. Their coach says they can, but only if they change their mind-set.

“We’ve got to look in the mirror and think that we’re better than we are,” John Anderson said. “We just can’t say, ‘I’m not good enough.’

“We’ve got to go out there and do something special, maybe somebody blocking a shot that ordinarily isn’t that type of player, or maybe somebody making a big hit, or a [fourth-line player like Eric] Boulton scoring a goal. That type of thing. We need to have somebody step out of their comfort zone to do something really good for the team and maybe pick the rest of the guys up.”

The Thrashers won 4-1 Tuesday to produce a two-game split against an Ottawa Senators team that has scored fewer goals than any other NHL team. They swept two from a New York Islanders team that has allowed more goals than any other NHL team. And they swept two from a Carolina Hurricanes team so troubled it has since fired its coach.

But the Thrashers can’t get by without getting at least some points against the league’s better teams. Since a season-opening victory over Washington, they’ve gotten just six points out of a possible 32 against teams that would have been in the playoffs if they had started Wednesday.

To get better, players say, they have to get tighter defensively. That doesn’t mean abandoning Anderson’s belief in sending a defenseman into the rush. It does mean making sure the rear-most forward stays back to cover for him. It means giving up fewer 2-on-1s and knowing when to dump the puck into the offensive zone rather than risking a turnover.

“Our biggest problem right now, among many problems, we’re trying to play this run-and-gun style of pond hockey, where we’re trading rush for rush,” defenseman Garnet Exelby said this week. “We don’t have a team that’s built for that. We’re giving up way too many chances, too many odd-man rushes, too many turnovers.

“We’ve got to start playing more defensive-minded and making that our focal point as a team. Otherwise, we’re going to have to score four or five goals a game to give ourselves a chance to win, and that’s just not realistic in this league.”

Tuesday’s victory was an example of the Thrashers getting more defensive-minded and seeing results, albeit against the Senators. One key sight: Ilya Kovalchuk, not known for his defense, coming through multiple times on the backcheck. That helped Atlanta win on a rare night when scoring leader Kovalchuk put no shots on goal.

(In fact, after 56 consecutive games with at least one shot on goal, Kovalchuk has now gone without one in back-to-back games for the first time since his rookie season of 2001.)

“We just need to work, and we need to be consistent,” Kovalchuk said. “That’s the key, because we don’t have any superstars on this team. We have to be the hardest-working team on the ice every night. Then we’ve got a chance to win.”

Wait a second. Isn’t Kovalchuk a superstar?

“I have to win something [to become that],” he said.