NEW YORK -- "You've gotta give our guys credit. We had some guys step up. We're headed in the right direction here."
This was Jared McCann. And yeah, he was eventually found, safe and sound.
For anyone who missed the waning minutes of the Penguins' 4-3 overtime loss to the Islanders on this Thursday night at Barclays Center, he'd been bizarrely banished to the locker room by one of two bungling referees ... even though there hadn't been a penalty called on him. And then, once this dawned on one or both, they skated to the visitors' bench to ask someone to summon him back.
No, seriously.
The short-straw assignment went to newly recalled Zach Trotman, who was sent sprinting down the tunnel ...
... after which he'd rush back to report McCann was getting ready.
Where was he?
"Right here," McCann would say later from the same stall. "Took my shoulder pads off. Started getting undressed. I was done, right?"
Mike Sullivan beseeched the bungling referees -- it doesn't feel right citing the collective work of T.J. Luxmore and Jean Hebert on this night without the descriptive adjective -- to wait for McCann to return for the final 2:18. Given that the Penguins needed a goal to tie and they were missing a vital quarter of their roster, he was kind of essential.
"Yes, we would've," Sullivan curtly replied when asked if he'd have preferred they wait.
They did. For about a minute. And then they dropped the puck. Even though it was, by their own visible, tangible admission, their mistake in sending a player completely off the ice.
No, seriously.
If that were the extent of their butchery on this night, that wouldn't have been a big deal. But when the Islanders, who have the NHL's fewest power plays, benefited from seven penalties against the Penguins, the league's second-least penalized team, and the visitors have only two-plus, something's generally amiss. And when Brandon Tanev was blatantly boarded by the Islanders' Anders Lee ...
... to lead into the dust-up that resulted in McCann errantly being ejected, that's another level altogether.
No one wanted to talk much about officiating, least of all Sullivan. That's the norm. He hates it. Sees nothing but negatives from doing so.
"It doesn't matter what I think," came the standard comeback. "You know, the referees are going to call the game the way they see it. We've got to live with it."
I tried McCann, tiptoeing around a nice way to word the question in hopes of getting an actual answer.
"Yeah, there's no nice way to put that," he replied somewhat substantively. "You know, it's frustrating for us as players. But we had no control over it. We just had to battle. And we did."
They did. They really did.
And that's where I'll boomerang way back up to the top of the column and McCann's quote about heading in the right direction.
Because they are. They really are.
Look, I know no one, including the participants themselves, want to hear this right now, but these two games against the Islanders -- despite the blown leads, despite Brock Nelson scoring in both overtimes -- have brought far more positives than negatives from this perspective.
Let me put it these three ways:
1. The refereeing's rarely this bad.
Or bungling, sorry. But it's true. Luxmore, in particular, is awful. And most nights, though there's the occasional complaint about a call, this was an all-out circus from front to finish.
As such, it's an outlier across the board for the Penguins to give up even a couple power plays, let alone seven, or to give up a couple power-play goals, as they did in this game after none in the previous 10. So this means next to nothing aside from a few grunts on the way out to the bus.
2. Few opponents are this hot. Ever.
The Islanders extended their points streak to a franchise-record 16, I'm betting you've heard. Well, it's on merit. They're fast, they're skilled, they're organized, they're deep, and they're all that and more:
NHLBut in the same breath, allow me to add that New York's lineup is missing only Tom Kuhnhackl to injury. And during this historic run, in which they've gone 15-0-1, they've conceded a grand total of eight points ... half of those to the Penguins, who are 1-0-2 against them, with all three meetings reaching overtime.
Which leads smoothly into this ...
1. They'll get healthy again.
I think so, anyway.
But on the day Sullivan put forth two more bursts of bad news -- Justin Schultz out 'longer-term' with a lower-body injury, Nick Bjugstad out a minimum eight weeks after core-muscle surgery -- this was precisely the way for this group to respond: They defended authoritatively, they dictated five-on-five possession -- 23-14 in shots, 35-29 in chances, 9-6 in high-danger chances -- and they fought like hell to tie, 3-3, with 29.9 ticks left on Patric Hornqvist's welcome return to the lineup:
Feels like this requires a reminder: Sidney Crosby isn't playing. Neither is Kris Letang. And with Schultz out, Chad Ruhwedel and Trotman saw their first NHL action of the fall.
And they're this competitive?
Against this opponent?
With this awful officiating?
I'd brought up how the Penguins needed to play without all these guys before the game with Sullivan, and his answer then was little different than afterward:
"Yes," he answered. "It was a collective effort. It was team play on both sides of the puck, and that's how we have to play, especially in the circumstance we're in right now."
The players seemed to feel the same.
"It's super-important that we keep going like this," Jack Johnson was telling me. "If you look back at our whole season so far, I'd say there's been no more than four times where we haven't played this way. It's frustrating not to get the extra point, but we know how we're playing."
"Overall, we had a really good game," Bryan Rust said. "That's how overtime goes: They had one good chance, and they scored."
Count the blessings. All the plusses above will lead to real results. The catch, of course, will be to continue putting up points until all those stars align again, but they achieved that here, too.
• Matt Murray again performed well enough in regulation -- all three New York goals came on odd bounces or redirects -- but not at all on Nelson's overtime winner:
Yikes.
Marcus Pettersson had Nelson cutting across, and Rust erased Mathew Barzal from the rush, so all Murray needed to do was ...um, nothing. Just hold his ground. Wait for whatever comes his way. Instead, as seen above, he strayed 20 feet out of the crease, then basically froze as Nelson simply skated by for the free deposit.
I asked Murray what happened:
"He made a nice play," Murray replied of Nelson. "He stayed patient. He had two or three chances to shoot it, and he just held onto it. Nice play."
That's fair regarding Nelson, but again, yikes.
• The Penguins' streak of 26 consecutive penalty-kills was snapped near the end of a Jake Guentzel double-minor, by Anthony Beauvillier midway at 11:38 of the second to tie, 2-2. There'd be another power-play goal, by Nelson, at 15:38 of the third to give New York a 3-2 lead.
"They pressured us really hard in Pittsburgh, and their PK's been hot," Nelson said, "so it was good to get a couple past them."
• Guentzel could have blamed the officiating for both parts of his double-minor -- he and New York defenseman Scott Mayfield appeared to have been mutually tangled, though he got the only roughing, then for Luxmore being thin-skinned as Guentzel barked on his way to the box -- but he instead stood in front of his stall and, in doing so, invited reporters' questions on the matter.
“I've got to keep my cool," he'd say. "I can't give them a chance to get back in the game by taking four minutes like that. I've got to be smarter.”
• Guentzel missed a few shifts in the first period after being struck in the upper back by a Trotman slap shot, this after being cross-checked by -- wait for it -- Mayfield. But he was back by the end of period and showed no ill effects other than a bright red shiner in that region afterward.
• Before that, Guentzel served up this slam dunk for Evgeni Malkin 1:04 into the game ...
... and 1:09 into the second, Rust wristed his eighth goal in the 11 games since his season started late, this essentially through Thomas Greiss' glove:
That line's been really good in the very early going since Crosby's departure: In their first 51 minutes, 16 seconds of ice time together at even-strength, they've generated 13 high-danger scoring chances to the opponents' five, as well as three goals and 31 shots.
• Alex Galchenyuk's still stuck on zero goals, which wasn't helped by his registering just two shots on his 14 shifts. But what's galling is that he also had, by my own count, four egregious giveaways. I'm talking blind, backhand passes to nobody.
It's one thing to be unproductive. It's quite another to do damage. He's veering toward the latter.
• Adam Johnson, please. Yesterday.
• Dominik Simon looked surprisingly comfortable -- and creative -- at center but, more important, he showed 'good chemistry' with Dominik Kahun, per Sullivan. Expect that duo to stick for a while.
• One last time with gusto: The Islanders are good. They're for real. But they're also at full health and had their hardest battles in the past month with three-quarters of the Penguins. That's not nothing. Forest over trees.
• Oh, and this was awesome:
Subscriber meetups are the best. So uplifting every chance to get to meet people who support what we do. By far the most rewarding thing about this venture. #DKPS #Penguins #LetsGoPens #Isles #PITvsNYI pic.twitter.com/uTr1GwK18a
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) November 22, 2019
THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
THE INJURIES
• Sidney Crosby (sports hernia surgery)
• Justin Schultz (unspecified lower-body)
• Nick Bjugstad (unspecified lower-body)
• Kris Letang (unspecified lower-body)
THE LINEUPS
Sullivan’s lines and pairings:
Guentzel-Malkin-Rust
Kahun-McCann-Tanev
Galchenyuk-Blandisi-Simon
Aston-Reese-Blueger-Lafferty
Dumoulin-Marino
Pettersson-Ruhwedel
Johnson-Trotman
And for Barry Trotz's Islanders:
Lee-Barzal-Eberle
Beauvilluer-Nelson-Brassard
Bailey-Koivula-Dal Colle
Martin-Cizikas-Clutterbuck
Leddy-Boychuk
Pelech-Pulock
Toews-Mayfield
THE SCHEDULE
The Penguins are right back at it in less than 24 hours, taking on the Devils back home at 7:08 p.m. New Jersey's guys were already in Pittsburgh much of Thursday, by the way, with a chance to watch this game on TV and rest up. We'll see how much that matters. Dave Molinari, Taylor Haase and Matt Sunday will have that.
THE COVERAGE
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