PITTSBURGH—Ian Cole does a great Phil Kessel, right? As the Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman puts it, it’s easy: “You just have to get really nasally and say, ‘eff me.’ ” The other day Cole was reminiscing about a killer move that Phil used to use when he was a teenager, loading the puck out wide so a defenceman would grab at it, then pulling it back across and whipping that sucker, and Cole kept saying: When am I gonna see that, Phil? And Phil told him, as Cole says in his best Phil voice, “Oh bud, the Senators just sit back, there’s too many guys back there.” Classic Phil.

In Game 2 of the Eastern Conference final, Phil was barking. Barking on the bench, barking with Evgeni Malkin, angry at one thing or another. He pounded his fist, stomped his foot, growled like a bear. (With Kessel’s grizzled playoff beard, the resemblance is more acute.) On Twitter, the GIFs sprang forth and multiplied: Furious Phil, angry Phil. What was he saying?

“I honestly don’t know,” said winger Chris Kunitz, who was sitting beside his linemate on one rant. “I don’t pay attention that much.”

Anyway, Phil was barking. Was it, “We’ve got to move the effing puck?” It looked like it might have been that. “It could be,” said Kunitz, grinning. That might make sense, right? The Penguins dominated all night. They erased Ottawa’s 1-3-1 trap; they owned the puck, rather than rent. But they couldn’t score, and Phil had a burr in his saddle. At one point, Kunitz seemed to be laughing about it. Did Phil amuse him?

“Lots of things amuse me out there,” said Kunitz, still grinning.

It was a stark reversal of Game 1, when Ottawa controlled the game, though the Penguins were still within one Phil wrist shot in the third period that, had it been three quarters of an inch lower, could have tied the game in the third. The Penguins have been getting grossly outshot in the playoffs, but their elite talent has propelled them here. Pittsburgh absolutely seized control of the game, holding Ottawa without a shot for nearly 19 minutes bridging the second and third periods. They were doing it despite being down their replacement No. 1 defenceman, and one of Sidney Crosby’s wingers. But they couldn’t score.

And Phil was barking, boy. Was he angry? He says he wasn’t angry.

“Nah, just playing,” said Kessel. “We had a lot of chances, right? Obviously it’s an emotional game, there’s ups and downs, and we found a way.”

Phil did, yeah. Phil has spent his life scoring goals out of nothing, scoring goals with his shock-absorber wrists and his near-peerless release. He did it in Boston until they traded him to Toronto. He did it in Toronto until they decided he wouldn’t make it through a single Mike Babcock practice. He did it with the Team USA national program until they decided they didn’t need him for the World Cup. And he has done it in Pittsburgh. Very few players in the world can shoot a puck like Phil.

Good thing, because in this game the Penguins were dominating play, just dominating. They reversed the trend of Game 1, eliminated their tentativeness, got angry with some Senators, including Dion Phaneuf, whose clean but devastating first-period bodycheck sent winger Bryan Rust to the room.

But no goals, until finally Pittsburgh’s stars broke through. With a little over seven minutes left Malkin sliced through Ottawa’s neutral-zone trap and found Kessel in the middle of the ice; Kessel’s first shot hit Jean-Gabriel Pageau and bounced right back to him. The second shot was released right away and screamed low to the glove side, leaving goaltender Craig Anderson lopsided. The Senators were sitting back there, like Phil said, but they sat back too much, and Phil found the crack he needed. The Penguins won Game 2 of the Eastern Conference final 1-0, and knotted the series 1-1.

“It was a fortunate bounce, right?” said Phil. “You know, it got blocked, and I just tried to get it off quick. And it went in. I think it’s just probably the initial block, and obviously for a goalie that’s always tough when it gets blocked and it comes right back to the guy. And you know, I was fortunate, but I’ll take it.”

So Phil was the star, right? He was the star. And his bench tantrums, they were funny, in the end.

“I didn’t hear what he was yelling about,” said Penguins defenceman Ron Hainsey, who played nearly 25 minutes after Justin Schultz left in the first period with what looked like an arm or shoulder injury. “He yells a lot. It could be about anything . . . I’m sure he yelled at me at one point. He wanted the puck back, I think. You can’t hear him.”

“Phil is always yelling,” said Kunitz.

“To be honest, I think I yelled more than once tonight,” said Kessel, when asked if was yelling for the effing puck. “So I don’t remember that time.”

Either way, Phil delivered. He has won a Cup in Pittsburgh as the team’s leading goal scorer in the post-season, and he seems to fit in Pittsburgh, more or less. He’s the third-best forward rather than the leading man, but he’s capable of being the one who turns the game. They accept his Phil-ness; his moods, his effort waves, his idiosyncrasies. These include, apparently, barking on the bench.

“Everyone blows off steam in different ways,” said Kunitz. “Some guys like to talk, some guys like to yell out loud, some guys kick the boards. Whatever it is that gets you back in the play and engaged is fine by me. He made a couple really nice passes early. You know that when he’s backchecking — he had a great shift in the third, one of our D broke his stick and Phil came back on the puck hard, and took a guy when he was going to the net. Guys don’t always get credit for it when they look at the negative things . . . he found a way to find a goal.”

“We call it a man’s argument,” said Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan. “That’s the way it is. I think it brings juice to the bench and Phil’s an emotional guy. When he wants a pass and he doesn’t get it, he lets the guy know. . . . It tells me he’s invested, like I love that about the guy. Yeah, he’s always like that. I think our players get a kick out of him, quite honestly.”

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Most other players have always gotten a kick out of Phil, because of his freakish talent and his unique personality, his funny awkwardness and his easy competitiveness and his ability to win at golf or ping-pong or tennis, whatever. That’s why they imitate him with that nasally voice, because he’s their guy. Because Phil scored the Penguins won, and the Penguins looked like they cracked the Ottawa code in this game. Maybe they even did.

“Pretty resilient group, right?” said Phil, wearing his custom 81 baseball cap, sitting in the middle of a cluster of a million reporters, comfortable as he gets in that situation, more or less. “We’ve been there before, and we got guys that can step in and step up, and we found a way to get it done tonight.”

Right.

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