Red Wings remain all business

PITTSBURGH -- Moments after the Detroit Red Wings had sweated and strained and hauled themselves within one victory of winning the franchise’s 11th Stanley Cup championship, forward Pavel Datsyuk was riding an exercise bike in a dank, narrow hallway at Mellon Arena.

He looked for all the world as if his team had just beaten Columbus on a random Thursday in February, not that it had tenaciously scratched out a 2-1 victory over the Penguins to take a prohibitive 3-1 series lead.

Inside the cramped visitors’ locker room, the rest of the Red Wings were similarly straight-faced, conducting their business as usual even though the circumstances were as unusual as could be.

Without Tomas Holmstrom, whose pulled hamstring was too sore for him to suit up, the Red Wings were forced to play a tight, gritty defensive game, and they succeeded on every level.

They killed a Pittsburgh five-on-three power play late in the third period while protecting their 2-1 lead, a marvel of perseverance and poise.

They got some clutch saves from Chris Osgood, including a tip-in attempt by Evgeni Malkin with four seconds to play.

They ended Pittsburgh’s 17-game home winning streak and put themselves in position Monday to win their fourth title in 11 years, to add a jewel to a string they began in 1997, continued in 1998 and replenished in 2002.

And they will get that chance Monday at Joe Louis Arena, where they are 9-1 this spring, including shutouts of the Penguins in Games 1 and 2.

It’s a measure of their character that not once did any Red Wings player gloat about the advantageous position the team occupies.

The most any player allowed himself was a weary smile, but even those were fleeting.

“Our experience of going through this before, this is where it helps,” said forward Darren McCarty, one of five Red Wings with three Cup titles to his credit.

“It’s sort of second nature. This is the task at hand. We don’t start thinking about other things. We have to play our best game of the year Monday night in Detroit. If we play our best game we’ll be all right.”

No one said anything incendiary. No one provided material that might be posted on the Penguins’ bulletin board to provide motivation for a rally.

The Red Wings are too smart for that.

“We know what’s at stake here. It’s in the back of our minds,” said Kirk Maltby, another of the team’s three-time Cup champions.

“For the guys who have been here before, who have been in this situation, we know that our next one is going to be the hardest of them all and they’re going to come out a desperate team.

“All the cliches,” he said, almost apologetically, “but it’s so true. We have to make sure we come out as desperate as them.”

There’s little chance this group will become unnerved or rattled Monday.

The Red Wings have conquered every challenge in this series with impressive ease and have delayed Sidney Crosby’s coronation as the game’s best player.

Maybe someday he will realize he had to go through this to be the player everyone expects him to be, that he learned something from watching the Red Wings clamp down defensively when it mattered most and control their emotions as decisively as they controlled the puck.

Maybe he’ll see the importance of teamwork and persistence, and that taking care of little details can help teams win big, gaudy Stanley Cup rings.

With Holmstrom out of the lineup, Dan Cleary stepped up to the first line and screened goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury on Nicklas Lidstrom’s goal, the Red Wings’ first on Saturday.

With Maltby and Andreas Lilja in the penalty box midway through the third period, eight minutes after Jiri Hudler had given Detroit a 2-1 lead, Henrik Zetterberg led the Red Wings’ penalty killers through a minefield and got them out with not so much as a scratch.

Kris Draper called the penalty killers’ job “unbelievable.” He wasn’t exaggerating.

“You see the guys they throw over the boards,” he said “that was really the difference in the hockey game, us being able to kill that off.”

Zetterberg was asked whether that sequence was the best he’d played in his life.

“What part?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“We played good. We tried to keep them outside and tried to be in the shooting lanes. And when they got a puck through [Osgood] made a save.”

They held the Penguins to two shots in 86 seconds, as remarkable as their work in holding the Penguins to four goals in the series, two by Crosby and one each by Marian Hossa and Adam Hall.

Only seven Penguins have recorded a point or more in the four games; the Red Wings’ 11 goals have been scored by nine players, with only Mikael Samuelsson (three) scoring more than one.

Just business as usual.

“Sure, you’re excited about being in a position like this,” Lidstrom said, his voice almost comically flat and devoid of emotion. “This is what you play for all year long, so this is where you want to be.”

And here they are.

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Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.