Egor Chinakhov had a goal and two assists, Evgeni Malkin had a goal and an assist, and Bryan Rust, Tommy Novak and Erik Karlsson scored for the Penguins (41-22-16), who had missed the postseason three straight seasons after a run of 16 straight appearances, including winning the Stanley Cup in 2009, 2016 and 2017.<\/p>\n
Sidney\u00a0Crosby had two assists and Stuart Skinner, who sustained an eye injury while sitting on the bench during a game on Saturday, made 19 saves for Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n
Paul Cotter and Jack Hughes scored and Jake Allen made 26 saves for the Devils (40-36-3), who were eliminated from playoff contention on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The score was 1-1 midway through the second period when\u00a0Novak and Chinakhov scored nine seconds apart to put the Penguins ahead.<\/p>\n
Novak made it a 2-1 game at 11:43, taking a pass from Malkin near the goal and beating Allen on the short side.<\/p>\n
Crosby won the ensuing face-off back to defenseman Ryan Shea, who flipped the puck in the air and found Chinakhov, who was able to gather it and bat a backhanded shot past Allen.<\/p>\n
Rust gave the Penguins a 1-0 lead at 4:53 of the first period when he completed a slick\u00a0tic-tac-toe play with Kris Letang and Chinakhov. Letang had the puck at the blue line, made a pass to a cutting Chinakhov, who one-timed it to Rust, who put it in before Allen could get back in position.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Devils made it 1-1 at 9:51 of the second period when\u00a0Dougie Hamilton flipped a high pass over the Penguins defense to Cotter, who skated in on Skinner and beat him with a slick forehand, backhand move.<\/p>\n
Hughes got the Devils to within 3-2 at 15:07 of the second when he took a pass near the blue line from Jonas\u00a0Siegenthaler, skated into the slot and beat Skinner with a wrist shot.<\/p>\n
Malkin gave Pittsburgh a 4-2 lead at 6:50 of the third, picking up a loose puck in the crease and banging it home after Crosby tossed the puck on goal from below the goal line. Karlsson scored an empty-net goal at 17:00 to make it 5-2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Egor Chinakhov had a goal and two assists, Evgeni Malkin had a goal and an assist, and Bryan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5109],"tags":[201,5,576,151,5185,5184,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-549170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-jersey-devils","8":"tag-devils","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-new-jersey","11":"tag-new-jersey-devils","12":"tag-newjersey","13":"tag-newjerseydevils","14":"tag-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116377933906046397","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}