Lousy line change on opening shift sets tone in streak-snapping loss

Forty seconds. That was all the time it took for the tone to be set regarding the kind of night the Penguins were in for.

And yet, in their 4-1 loss to the Maple Leafs here at PPG Paints Arena on Saturday night, they were a bit lucky. Lucky that the final score wasn't considerably worse.

Before the game, Mike Sullivan shared the importance of establishing being a "stingy team at home," but, as Kris Letang would tell me afterward, "Right from the get-go, we didn’t apply pressure, we didn’t execute. We didn’t have any details in our game."

So little pressure, mind you, that Mitch Marner was able to waltz in all alone on Casey DeSmith before dangling the mess out of him to open the scoring. 

Forty seconds:

"It’s a bad line change, and we need more awareness," Sullivan said.

All four Pittsburgh skaters on the ice not named Rickard Rakell concluded it would be a good time to head off for a change despite the puck barely making its way to center-ice. At the forefront of that was Sidney Crosby, who uncharacteristically peeled off the puck before ensuring that doing so wouldn't lead to imminent danger.

It didn't help matters that Crosby took his time getting back to the bench, and he immediately displayed his frustration after the puck wound up in the back of the net:

Crosby ended up leaving the Penguins' bench to go down the tunnel on two separate occasions in the first period, most likely due to an issue with his skate.

"Yeah, just miscommunication," Jake Guentzel said of the sequence. "We all five changed and they made a nice play, quick up, and that just can’t happen that early in the game."

The reason that can't happen so early in the game was made clear by the absolute slog of a performance that followed for a big chunk of the game to follow. The sequence was simply a microcosm of what was to come.

Miraculously, the Penguins went into the first intermission trailing by a lone goal despite being outshot 17-5 and feeding the Maple Leafs' dangerous counterattack seemingly every other possession.

Let's not forget the Penguins were tasked with trying to score on 26-year-old Erik Kallgren, who had an .889 save percentage across all of 23 games of NHL experience coming into this one.

Nearing the halfway point, the Penguins finally got around to getting some pucks on net, but it wasn't long before Pontus Holmberg's goal zapped any sort of momentum they might have been building:

In the moments before Holmberg's goal, Letang fanned on a pass in the offensive zone that sent the Maple Leafs the other way. This led to Marner taking Letang's footing out from under him, which then led to the goal.

"I saw him coming, I was bracing for it," Letang said. "His foot just clipped the back of my heel and I kind of lost balance."

When asked if he was surprised that a penalty wasn't assessed to Marner, Letang said his reaction "kind of tells it all."

Under a minute of game time later, William Nylander caught the Penguins puck-watching as Auston Matthews fed him a pass from below the goal line that he one-timed to the far side of DeSmith, completely sucking away the little remaining life the Penguins brought to the second night of a back-to-back:

"We got outplayed. We just got outplayed," Sullivan said. "I thought Toronto played hard. You got to give Toronto credit, they played hard. They defended hard, they made us work for our offense, and I thought we gave them some easy looks. We’ve got to do a better job pushing back, we need to defend harder. I think we got outplayed."

Putting up a stinker of a performance in the second night of a back-to-back has been a theme for the NHL's oldest team so far this season, but Sullivan didn't place the blame on the age of the team.

"I don’t know the answer," Sullivan responded when asked if the back-to-back struggles are age-related or simply coincidental. "I think what I would say to you is that the sample size is pretty small, so it might be difficult to draw any conclusions from that. I don’t have a valid answer for you. We need to be better."

The Penguins trailed by only two goals after scoring their first goal of the game over halfway through the third period, but it was just several minutes after that until another brutal breakdown sealed their fate:

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. That's the Penguins leaving the best goal-scorer this league has seen since Alex Ovechkin all alone -- and I mean all alone -- to blow his world-class wrister by DeSmith.

Notice that little gesture from DeSmith after the goal? That "You really left that guy all alone?" gesture? I asked him about it after the game.

"Yeah, just frustration," DeSmith told me. "I wish I could’ve had that one and kept it a two-goal game. A two-goal game, pull the goalie, you just never know. Three goals, obviously that’s tough."

DeSmith stopped 37 of 41 shots, and although his .902 save percentage wouldn't lead you to believe so, was the reason the Penguins were able to hang around in this game for as long as they did.

"We left him out to dry a couple times, but he made some big saves for us and kept us in the game all night," Guentzel said of DeSmith's performance.

A couple times might be underselling it. Here's a look at all of the Maple Leafs' unblocked shot attempts in this one, scaled to their expected goal value, per Evolving-Hockey:

Evolving-Hockey.com

Squares are unblocked shot attempts, scaled to expected goal value. Bigger = higher xG value. Yellow = goal, green = on target, orange = miss.

Yes, it was the second night of a back-to-back and the third game in four days for the Penguins, but the Maple Leafs were dealing with the exact same circumstances and managed to blow the Penguins' doors off.

As Sullivan said, we're talking about a limited and cherry-picked sample size here as it relates to back-to-backs, but the Penguins have plenty more of them on the way. They'll have to find a way to power through the intense stretches, and that starts with, well, starting the game on the right foot.

"There’s no explanation," Letang said. "It’s too quick after a game to tell you what went wrong, I just think that our start was wrong, and it’s tough when you start like this."

JUSTIN BERL / GETTY

Jeff Carter hits Justin Holl in the first period of Saturday's game at PPG Paints Arena.

MORE FROM THE GAME

• Rakell scored the only goal for the Penguins, his ninth of the season:

That slick finish deserves every bit of attention it gets, but what I love about this goal is how Rakell dipped to the middle of the ice, right around Pierre Engvall, to get open and put himself in a position to get that shot off when the puck fortuitously came his way.

• Rakell continues to play a very solid game, and has been one of the few Penguins to actually show up on nights like this. He attempted 11 shots, six of which were on goal. The Penguins have scored an absurd 71.4% of the goals with him on the ice at 5-on-5 this season.

• Rakell had a goal disallowed earlier in the game. Taylor Haase has a Freeze Frame on that subject.

• With the secondary assist on Rakell's goal, Crosby picked up his 20th point of the season during 5-on-5 play. That's more than any other player in the NHL. He now has 29 points in 22 games this season, only five of those points coming on the power play. If the Penguins' power play were moderately competent, he'd be rivaling Connor McDavid for the league-lead in points.

• Crosby is currently on pace for 108 points over a full season. That would check in as the second-most points in a single season by a player 35 or older in NHL history. 

• Jan Rutta prevented the Maple Leafs from scoring a power-play goal in the second period when he went full plank on the ice to block a shot after DeSmith had lost his net:

• I'm not sounding a doom-and-gloom alarm here, but there aren't any signs that Letang is on his way out of the funk that he's been mired in for most of the season. He was nowhere near his best against the Maple Leafs, as his decision-making was questionable, he whiffed on a number of simple passes, and really just looked to be fighting it all night. You don't need me to tell you this, but the Penguins aren't going anywhere if he doesn't turn it around in a big way.

• I will, however, sound the doom-and-gloom alarm regarding the third line. It has been a problem for several weeks, and that includes the stretch in which Brock McGinn was scoring goals off the rush at will. Aside from McGinn's rush scoring that, let's be real, isn't all that sustainable, the third line spends nearly every game running around the defensive zone. When they finally get out, they're so gassed that they have to chip and change, and if they don't, they typically have very brief offensive-zone possessions. 

It'd be nice for the Penguins to have a third line that could be leaned on during games like this, but instead, they've got a third line that struggles to keep its head above water most nights. Danton Heinen once again went the entire game without even so much as attempting a shot. He hasn't scored in over a month. Jeff Carter isn't driving play in the slightest. Aside from an empty-net goal on Nov. 20, he hasn't scored in over a month, either. There's no easy solution, as breaking up any of the other forward lines would dismantle an otherwise solid foundation that has been put in place.

• Letang, Guentzel and Jason Zucker tied for the team-lead in hits with seven. 

• Kasperi Kapanen was a healthy scratch again. He has played in one game since Nov. 5.

• Christina Aguilera was in attendance for the game:

Kudos to her for sitting through the whole thing:

• Thanks, as always, for reading!

THE ESSENTIALS

• Boxscore
• Live file
• Scoreboard
• Standings
• Statistics

THE HIGHLIGHTS

THE THREE STARS

As selected at PPG Paints Arena:

1. Auston Matthews, Maple Leafs C
2. Mitch Marner, Maple Leafs RW
3. Rickard Rakell, Penguins RW

THE INJURIES

• Shockingly, the Penguins remain completely healthy.

THE LINEUPS

Sullivan’s lines and pairings:

Jake Guentzel - Sidney Crosby - Rickard Rakell
Jason Zucker - Evgeni Malkin - Bryan Rust
Brock McGinn - Jeff Carter - Danton Heinen
Ryan Poehling - Teddy Blueger - Josh Archibald

Marcus Pettersson - Kris Letang
P.O Joseph - Jeff Petry
Brian Dumoulin - Jan Rutta

And for Sheldon Keefe's Maple Leafs:

Michael Bunting - Auston Matthews - William Nylander
Calle Jarnkrok - John Tavares - Mitch Marner
Alex Kerfoot - Pontus Holmberg - Pierre Engvall
Zach Aston-Reese - David Kampf - Denis Malgin

Mark Giordano - Justin Holl
Rasmus Sandin - Timothy Liljegren
Victor Mete - Mac Hollowell

THE SCHEDULE

The Penguins have a scheduled day off on Sunday. They'll be back on the ice for practice on Monday, 11 a.m., at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex in Cranberry. Their next game is Tuesday night against the Hurricanes at PPG Paints Arena.

THE CONTENT

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