NEWARK, N.J. -- When the Penguins overtook the Panthers in the standings on Sunday with a vital, 4-2 win over the Flyers, the refrain from players and coach alike was that the Penguins now "hold our own destiny in our hands."
With five games left in the Penguins' regular-season schedule, they were in control of their playoff hopes with a one-point hold over the second and final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference.
They let that destiny fall out of their own control Tuesday.
The Penguins did themselves no favors with their awful, 5-1 loss to the Devils at Prudential Center. Elsewhere, the Panthers hosted the Sabres down in South Florida. With the Panthers holding the tiebreaker of regulation wins, even just one point gained from an overtime loss would have been enough for the Panthers to overtake the Penguins in the standings and take control of destiny.
The Panthers did their part and came away with a 2-1 win over the Sabres. Destiny is now in Florida's hands:
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The Panthers actually overtook both the Penguins and Islanders in the standings and now occupy the first wild card spot. The Panthers and Islanders both have 87 points in 78 games, but the Panthers sit ahead of the Islanders with 34 regulation wins, one more than the Islanders' 33. The Penguins sit just on the outside with 86 points in 78 games. With only 29 regulation wins, they need to beat the Panthers and Islanders on points alone to overtake them. They wouldn't win a tiebreaker with either team.
The Penguins have four games left in their regular-season schedule -- at home against the Wild on Thursday, on the road against the Red Wings on Saturday, at home against the Blackhawks on Tuesday and on the road against the Blue Jackets on the following Thursday.
That's games against one playoff opponent in the Wild, and one technically still in the hunt in the Red Wings.
The Panthers' final four games are a little bit tougher -- the Senators, Capitals, Maple Leafs and Hurricanes. That's two top teams in the East in Carolina and Toronto, and one still fighting for a spot in Ottawa.
The Islanders have the easiest schedule remaining of the three teams -- the Lightning, Flyers, Capitals and Canadiens. The Lightning are the only team in a playoff spot (or even in contention for a playoff spot) of those four teams, and the Flyers and Canadiens are among the Eastern Conference's worst teams this season.
The advanced stats website MoneyPuck runs a playoff probability model that predicts a team's odds of making the playoffs that factors in the strength of schedule remaining. After Tuesday's games in the Eastern Conference, the Panthers' odds to make the playoffs are now 78.6%. The Islanders' odds are 78.3%. The Penguins' odds have fallen to 41.6%.
This loss really, really jeopardized the Penguins' postseason appearance streak of 16 straight seasons -- the longest such active streak in all of professional sports -- perhaps more than any loss so far in this last stretch of the season. This was one they absolutely needed to win, and they were outplayed from the start.
We've seen stretches where such a total and complete loss like this can snowball and turn into a losing streak. The Penguins have put themselves in a position where they can't even afford to have play like this carry over at all.
"We can't take any time to dwell on it," Bryan Rust said. "We have to get back on the horse and we have to be better. We only have so many games left to make our push and get into a playoffs. I don't expect any carryover. We have to park this one. We have to be a lot better than that. We're going to bring it on Thursday."
His coach expressed a similar sentiment.
"I'm not sure we have the luxury of thinking in those terms," Mike Sullivan said when asked of the danger of a game like this carrying over. "We're looking at the game right in front of us. We're disappointed tonight, we didn't get the result. We didn't play well enough. We got outplayed. All we can do is figure out what we can take from it and try to apply it to the next game. That's what we'll try to do. We're going to have to stay in the fight here. We're still in it. That's the way we've got to look at it. We have to stay with it."
