VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Mike Sullivan coached his 500th regular-season NHL game Saturday night.
He could probably coach another 500 -- or maybe another 500,000 -- before he experiences one quite like this again.
One in which neither team manages a shot on goal for the first 10 1/2 minutes of play, and one of them fails to generate any before the first intermission.
One in which a team is assessed eight minutes worth of minor penalties in a span of one minute, 27 seconds -- none of them offset by a call against the other club -- which force it to play down two men for a period that lasts longer than some careers.
One in which the team that has that extended two-man advantage finally capitalizes on it, only to have the goal overturned upon review because of an infraction that occurred more than a minute earlier.
So, no, Sullivan isn't likely to confuse the Penguins' 4-1 loss to the Canucks at Rogers Arena with any other game he's spent running an NHL bench. Or during his lengthy career as a player, for that matter.
"I don't know that I've ever been part of a period like that," he said. "It was bizarre."
The first period, when the Penguins failed to get a shot on goal during a road period for the first time in franchise history, certainly was.
And while the inability of either team to get a puck on goal during the first half of the period was hard to ignore, Sullivan seemed more troubled by the call that triggered the sequence featuring all those penalties. That came at 12:24, when Dominik Simon was assessed a double-minor for high-sticking Adam Gaudette.
"He gets his stick lifted by their defenseman," Sullivan said. "For me, that's incidental contact."
The officials disagreed and 41 seconds later, Brandon Tanev joined Simon in the penalty box after he was called for holding. Jack Johnson completed the hat trick of infractions with a tripping minor at 13:51.
The Penguins did an admirable job of killing the resultant 5-on-3 until J.T. Miller beat Matt Murray from below the right circle at 14:45.
Video replays, however, confirmed that the play had been offside 62 seconds before Miller scored, and the goal was disallowed:
Sullivan said the Penguins realized in real time that the play was offside, and thus were prepared to issue a challenge once the Canucks scored. He acknowledged, though, that it was a first for him to see a goal scored more than a minute after the rule violation that was certain to cause it to be waved off.
But while Miller's goal didn't count, the impact of playing while down two men on the Penguins' penalty-killers couldn't be wiped away so easily.
"Anytime that happens, especially early in the game, it takes a lot out of you," Bryan Rust said.
Whatever lift the Penguins had gotten from their quality work while shorthanded and the Miller goal being disallowed vanished after Jake Virtanen got a 5-on-3 goal at 15:10:
And Miller netted a conventional power-play goal at 17:00:
That put the Penguins in a hole from which they never escaped, in part because they didn't force Canucks goalie Jacob Markstrom to stop a single shot during the first 20 minutes.
"I don't think we put ourselves in a great situation," Rust said. "Maybe we came out a little bit flat and then we took some penalties that maybe we shouldn't have and we paid for it."
Markstrom's counterpart, Murray, was the focus of much pre-game attention because he was making his first start in two weeks and has been supplanted by Tristan Jarry as the Penguins' go-to goalie.
"For sure, it felt a little weird," Murray said. "It felt like forever since I'd played."
His raw numbers -- four goals-against on 14 shots -- against the Canucks were, well, raw. Given the circumstances under which at least a few of the goals were scored, however, Sullivan was reluctant to offering the scalding evaluation that some might have anticipated.
"It's a tough game to really assess because there weren't a lot of shots," he said. "There weren't a lot of scoring opportunities. But the ones they got were high-quality, and they converted. ... I don't think we should over-think it."
Murray shrugged off a suggestion that his return to active duty was made more difficult by the lack of shots early in the game, followed immediately by the extended 5-on-3 assault he faced -- "It is what it is," he said. "That's hockey." -- but said his personal statistics didn't necessarily present a complete picture of how the evening played out for him.
"I know the numbers don't back it up, but I honestly didn't feel all that bad," Murray said. "Especially considering how long it's been (since he'd played).
"I felt pretty smoother, for the most part. Timing felt pretty good, for the most part. I just needed to make a couple more saves."
A few more saves -- whether it was reasonable to expect them or not -- weren't the only thing the Penguins could have used on this night. Nonetheless, they've reached the NHL's holiday break with a record of 21-11-4. That's not bad for a group that has lost 143 man-games to injury and illness, most of those by players who fill significant roles.
"I really like our team," Sullivan said. "I think this team plays hard. I give our players a lot of credit. I think we've really rallied around some of the adversity we've faced to this point.
"We've found ways to win games. This is a resilient group. We have great leadership. We have good people. I can't say enough about this group of players.
"They're all buying-in. They're playing hard. They're playing for one another. And because of that, we're giving ourselves a chance to win on most nights."
The ones that aren't stranger than any he has seen before, anyway.
• The only other time the Penguins went an entire period without a shot was in the third period of a home game against San Jose Nov. 23, 2002.
• Jake Guentzel scored the Penguins' only goal, beating Markstrom during a power play at 15:28 of the second. It was his 18th goals of the season, but first in five games. "He's getting chances," Sullivan said. "It's not like he's not contributing or helping us in that regard. We have such high expectations for him because he scores an awful lot."
• The Penguins had a miserable night on faceoffs, winning just 21 of 60. Dominik Kahun (2-2) and Joseph Blandisi (1-1) were their only players to so much as break even on draws.
• Vancouver ran up a 25-10 edge in blocked shots and a 33-15 advantage in hits.
• THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
THE INJURIES
• Nick Bjugstad (core muscle surgery)
• Sidney Crosby (sports hernia surgery)
• Brian Dumoulin (ankle surgery)
• Patric Hornqvist (unspecified lower-body)
* Justin Schultz (unspecified lower-body)
THE LINEUPS
Sullivan’s lines and pairings:
Jake Guentzel -- Evgeni Malkin -- Bryan Rust
Zach Aston-Reese -- Jared McCann -- Dominik Kahun Alex Galchenyuk -- Teddy Blueger -- Brandon Tanev Dominik Simon -- Joseph Blandisi -- Sam Lafferty
Jack Johnson -- Kris Letang Marcus Pettersson -- John Marino Juuso Riikola -- Chad Ruhwedel
And for Travis Green's Canucks:
Tanner Pearson -- Bo Horvat -- Loui Eriksson
J.T. Miller -- Elias Pettersson -- Brock Boeser
Antoine Roussel -- Adam Gaudette -- Jake Virtanen
Tim Schaller -- Jay Beagle -- Tyler Motte
Quinn Hughes -- Chris Tanev
Oscar Fantenberg -- Tyler Myers
Jordie Benn -- Troy Stecher
THE SCHEDULE
The Penguins are getting an early start on the NHL's holiday break, which officially begins Tuesday and runs through Thursday. They are scheduled to fly home Sunday and will not be together again until they convene Friday morning for a flight to Nashville, where they will face the Predators that night in the front end of a home-and-home series.
THE COVERAGE
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