Mixed news in changes for the Penguins; the bad is Erik Karlsson being out of the lineup with injury to send the blueline into a myriad of changes. The good is Bryan Rust returning from an injury of his own to restore balance and order to the forward groups. Arturs Silovs gets his turn in net.
The Lightning have a tough injury update of their own with star forward Brayden Point getting hurt in last night’s game against Philadelphia. They didn’t use starting goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy last night, he’s good to go for this one.
It wasn’t a period to remember for Nikita Kucherov, who entered the night on a nine-game multi-point streak. As in, more than one point in all of his last nine games. In the first he has to settle for multiple tripping penalties, though the new-look Pittsburgh power play without Karlsson looks a lot like they are as far as an out of sync group.
Brandon Hagel hits the post in the interim, that’s about it by way of scoring chances in the early going.
Shots are 9-8 TB through the first period.
Pittsburgh gets a third straight power play via Erik Cernak tripping a player before tripping up himself and sliding into the boards. This one looks a lot more cohesive with puck movement and generating shots but it still doesn’t score.
The penalty calls swing the other way, Clifton gets whistled for interfering on Jake Guentzel. The Tampa power play snaps the puck all around the ice with a frightening amount of ease. Darren Raddysh rings one of his 90+ mph bombs off the cross-bar, it stays out.
Sidney Crosby is the next to go to the penalty box after elbowing a guy in the head. It’s a much more aggressive and effective PK for the Pens in their second attempt at it.
Well, it’s been good goaltending on both sides so far. No goals through 40 minutes.
It almost looked like first couple of periods were a warmup for Tampa, who took things to the next level to start the third period buzzing around and really turning up the temperature.
Big moment came a few minutes in, Clifton made a great play to break up a Kucherov pass. Later in the shift, Clifton boards Hagel. Anthony Cirelli takes offense to that and gets in a kerfuffle with Clifton. The refs don’t know what to make of it, at first they only charge Clifton with a 5-minute major for boarding and pin an instigator and fighting major to Cirelli. It takes another review and then the refs work it out all over again and get Clifton for fighting as well. It shakes out to be a 4-on-4 situation for two minutes, then a Tampa power play.
The refs still don’t really get it right since they don’t put a Penguin in the box to serve the penalty and come back on the ice, but luckily there’s a whistle before it gets that far to finally get things straightened out.
Tampa scores with 5:47 to go. Silovs makes a stop on Yanni Gourde and thinks he has the puck, but he doesn’t have the puck. JJ Moser notices and pokes it in. The rest of the Penguins had let up, but none of them would have made it in time to defend Moser anyways. Weird one, 1-0 Tampa.
Pittsburgh pulls Silovs with 3:17 left to go – and wouldn’t you know who won the pony? Kris Letang pinches up the wall and pulls the puck away from Guentzel and gets it to the middle for Evgeni Malkin. Malkin snaps a shot over the pad, under the blocker, perfect shot to beat a great goalie. 1-1 game with 2:16 to play.
Silovs stands tall with a late save on Guentzel. That plus Malkin’s goal forces overtime and puts one point on the board for the standings.
Kindel-Malkin-Letang are the opening trio for the Pens. They mostly hold the puck but don’t do much with it. Crosby hits Bryan Rust with a stretch pass but Vasilevskiy is there to stop it.
Kucherov gets in behind the defense and tries to lift a shot over Silovs, stopped again. The Pens get the better of the chances in the closing sequence, Vasilevskiy has Rust’s patented power move to the forehand scouted well and takes away the bottom.
Rakell starts things off, he tries to pick a spot and shoot but Vasilevskiy stops him.
Gage Goncalves about mimics what Rakell did but hits his mark and scores.
Crosby is next, he tries to deke and doesn’t even get a shot attempt away when the puck rolls off his stick.
Guentzel goes for Tampa, he comes in with speed and tries to go low, Silovs stops it.
Egor Chinakhov has to score to keep it alive, he does with a fast release and low shot.
Kucherov has the chance to win, he makes it look easy dekeing to the forehand and flipping the puck into the net.
The Karlsson injury is a big, big chance for Connor Clifton. Clifton’s played two games in the last month entering tonight, he’s found a way to have more staying power on the roster than some others who have been jettisoned previously (Ryan Graves, Matt Dumba, Harrison Brunicke), that ability to cling to a roster doesn’t last forever. Clifton should be a regular for the next little bit, no small opportunity at this point of the season. The boarding hit was dicey and luckily partially nullified by Cirelli going at him.Decent start to that highlighted by that big-time shift in the third. Never want to see a full on boarding hit, yet it’s an example of the physical edge that Clifton will bring to the table. The Pens are nothing if not more rugged with him in the lineup, and they’re going to need to be scrappy and have that kind of blue collar mentality at this point of the season where they and their opponents are all deep into the grind.On Saturday a ton of Penguin streaks got broken. Tonight, it was Kucherov multi-point streak disappearing but Pittsburgh failed to stop the Lightning’s winning streak. Hard to imagine they’ve done it without Victor Hedman and a lot of it without Ryan McDonough (also tonight Cernak played a reduced role after suffering an injury falling into the boards, further depleting their blueline). Hockey teams can be pretty resilient like that to lose stars and keep chugging, thinking back even to the Penguins over the years for when Malkin and/or Crosby have been out of the lineup. Helps, of course, when you have as much to fall back on as TB does with their forward group and goalie.It was a goalie duel all night long, yet also one where the class difference between was on display between “five-time Vezina finalist” and “24-year old trying to figure out it”. The score remained equal for 54 minutes and then again at the final horn, the way it got there was a much different story.One goalie was making everything look easy, the other got bailed out by a couple of posts, left rebounds regularly and generally fought the puck a lot more. Not that it’s a knock on Silovs as to why the Pens lost (though I suppose his two goals allowed on three shots also counts), it’s just that it looked like Vasilevskiy had it in cruise control all night long. If you watched these two goalies for 53 minutes and were told “one of these goalies is going to lose a puck and cough up a goal”, based on the performance 10/10 objective observers could have predicted it wasn’t going to be Vasilevskiy making the miscue.Officially now on the NHL pages it’s displaying as Egor Chinakhov, no longer a “Yegor” in an apparent correction, not a sudden urge to spell it differently. Hey, writing these notes deep into a 0-0 game at this point, trying to come up with some tidbits for the people.As a part of their preseason media, BFF’s Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon had a chat about MacKinnon’s favorite player to watch, which Crosby of course knew was Kucherov. It’s a good pick by MacKinnon, they complimented Kucherov on being so smooth, a great word to choose in describing him. Everything Kuch does almost lulls you to a false since of security because it looks like he’s not in a hurry until — bam — he creates a lot of power in a shot or pass with a quick flick of the wrists almost out of nowhere. Smooth indeed, just unbelievable how he could come into today having produced 24 points in the last nine games. Tommy Novak’s having a pretty decent season and he’s got 20 points all year — that’s about the last two weeks for Kucherov!Despite the big loss of Karlsson missing his first game of the season, the Pens still have been pretty lucky on the injury bug this season. They’ve had a few key players miss some games, they also have seven others who have dressed for all 45 games so far this season.Guentzel has now played six career games against the Penguins, he hasn’t scored a goal yet against his old team (he does have four assists). It’s not for a lack of trying with 22 shots on goal in those six games. Given his goal scoring rates per game and with his shooting ability that’s an odd and growing anomaly.One player we didn’t see a lot of was Justin Brazeau tonight, who only played 9:28 total, including just three shifts and 2:47 of ice time in the third period and naturally nothing in the 3v3 OT. It didn’t look like Brazeau ever left the bench via injury but for whatever reason wasn’t taking a regular in this game. That’s notable if only because this season under Dan Muse just about all players on all lines have very much been rotating in with regularity. Might be interesting to see if he’s dinged up or it was simply a coaching decision in not liking the level of play he’s bringing to the table.Honestly, this game should make everyone feel just a little bit better about all the blown leads in December that the Pens suffered. It looked like they were not going to score a goal all night long, until the 6v5 situation paid off (just as so many 5v6’s where the other team pulls their goalie have bit Pittsburgh so frequently). To get a point out of this game given they only scored only goal almost 58 minutes in is some good fortune. Most nights that would result in a regulation loss with such a weak offensive output.Chinakhov is nice on the shootout, the Pens need that kind of young skill that are effective at that craft. As written before and sure to be repeated again, shootouts are always going to be an issue until the team acquires players more proficient in that skill. It’s impossible to knock selecting Crosby, even though he hasn’t been coming through very often lately, but that didn’t work out again. It’s a step in the right direction to have Chinakhov. The next optimization is put Chinakhov earlier in the shootout — Tampa had the opportunity to end the game before he even got to take his turn by virtue of being a third round choice. That would have been a disaster and is a lesson that should be learned sooner than later, the best shooters need to be placed as early as possible in the order.
All things considered, the Penguins competed well and every point is crucial so it was nice to not come up completely empty. They still see their losing streak move to three games however at least they can take some positives by scoring late and can hopefully use that to set their sights on a massively important game coming up on Thursday against the Flyers.