Jarry yanked in second period, while Senators' Korpisalo 'stood on head'

The frustrating thing about this Penguins team is that they keep finding new ways to lose.

The Penguins' 5-2 loss to the Senators at PPG Paints Arena on Saturday night dropped the Penguins' record to 3-5, tying them with the Sabres for the worst record in the conference.

Sure, there have been trends across those losses -- things like perimeter play, limited bodies at the net front, or an underperforming power play. But the storyline changes -- maybe one game it's a second-period collapse, and another loss is a slow start. One game the team can't get much off in the way of offense, in another game the problem is in their own end.

The story Saturday night was the goaltending -- one guy stole his team a win, and the other got yanked after allowing three goals on nine shots.

By any measure other than the score, the Penguins were out playing the Senators for much of the game. The Penguins' got off to a hot start, outshooting the Senators 22-7 in the first 20 minutes alone. And while that 66-shot pace didn't exactly prove to be sustainable, they ended up leading 41-26 in the shot totals by the end of the game.

Oftentimes what that means is just that those weren't good shots, right? The Penguins must have been going for quantity over quality, and not doing things like going to the high-danger areas at the net front to look for redirects or rebounds, unlike the Senators, who made their shots count, right? No! That wasn't even the case here. The Penguins -- especially the top line of Jake Guentzel, Sidney Crosby and Bryan Rust -- were going to the net front and getting shots off from those areas of the ice all night, seemingly every shift in the case of the top line. And it did pay off for the top line -- first with a Crosby goal off of a redirect of a Rust pass in the first period, and then again in the final minute as Guentzel ripped a shot from the slot as Rust tied up a Senators defenseman at the net front.

The stat expected goals is a metric that just takes the quantity and quality of shot attempts and assigns them values based on actual league-wide data on how often a shot with that type or angle or distance (along with other factors) is likely to turn into a real goal. It has a goofy-sounding name (expected by whom?) but all it does is address the fact that not all shots are equal, and pops out a pretty number that reflects how many goals on average should have been scored based on the quality of shots a team was taking.

That means that if a team is dominating in shots on goal but is taking garbage shots but allowing dangerous shots, that would be reflected here. But the Penguins led here too, 4.27-2.97.

"We just couldn't score," Lars Eller told me of what changed this game after such a dominant performance against a top team in the previous game. "We had plenty of good chances and couldn't get the puck in the net."

Right. But was it anything the Penguins' shooters were doing, or more so Joonas Korpisalo putting on a show in Ottawa's net?

"Just the guy stood on his head," Eller said.

"He played well," Guentzel said. "I thought we had good chances, but sometimes (goaltending) is part of it."

Kris Letang also acknowledged the good shots the team was getting off, saying that the "forwards were all over the blue paint," and that luck didn't seem to be on their side either in this one. 

"At some point, I don't even think he saw the puck," Letang said of Korpisalo. "He was swimming in the crease. Sometimes it bounces in, sometimes it doesn't."

Sure, there were things the Penguins' skaters could have done better, especially as the game went on. That early urgency fell off, and the Senators pressed hard in the third period. Looking at what led to so much offense in the 4-0 shutout of Colorado the game before, the Penguins were more structured defensively and were able to consistently turn good defense directly into shots off the rush that turned into goals, or good scoring opportunities that got turned away. There wasn't as much of that in this game, not at all. The aggressiveness was missing.

"You've got to give their goalie credit," Mike Sullivan said of Korpisalo. "He made a lot of big saves for them tonight. That's part of it. We've got to find a way to get behind them, I think. In the third period, we pressed as the period went on, because we're down a couple of goals. We're trying to get back in it. Give Ottawa credit, I thought they defended really well in the third period, they had numbers back. I don't think we helped ourselves, I thought we slowed the game down a little bit in the third. I thought we could have played a little bit quicker through the neutral zone. That would have given us an opportunity to establish the game that we had established in the first period."

What could have made this a closer game -- maybe even a win -- would be if the Penguins got the same level of play from their own goaltender. 

Tristan Jarry entered this game coming off of a 31-save shutout of one of the top teams in the league, his second shutout of the year. He's a better goaltender than Korpisalo. He just didn't have it tonight. He allowed three goals on nine shots -- it would have been four on 10, without the saving grace of a successful close offside challenge early in the second period. 

The first goal was a redirect from Ridly Greig:

.. then came a Brady Tkachuk wrister off the rush:

Neither one of those were particularly bad goals to give up, but then again, neither were all the redirects or shots off the rush that Korpisalo was stopping.

The last goal Jarry gave up was this shot from Dominik Kubalik. No traffic to see through, just a clear shot:

Jarry was pulled after the third goal in favor of Magnus Hellberg, who made his Penguins debut after being recalled from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton earlier in the week. Hellberg was fine in relief, and stopped 15 of 17 shots. 

Sullivan wasn't quite ready to offer assessments of Jarry's game -- or Hellberg's either, for that matter. It was too soon after the game, and 

“I thought Ottawa was very opportunistic," he said. "The chances that they got, they finished on. They're a team that can score goals. They have some dynamic forwards. It’s not an easy one right after the game to digest the goaltending performance, per se. For me, it's more about a collective effort. But what I will say is I thought Ottawa, to their credit, were very opportunistic.”

Alex Nedeljkovic's start to the season had him looking like the kind of backup that could shoulder a fair amount of the workload moving forward. He's now out until Nov. 19 at the earliest because of long-term injured reserve minimum requirements as he deals with a lower-body injury. 

Jarry is going to need to carry the team for the next few weeks, at least. He's been serviceable in his start to the season, at times even great -- as recently as two nights before this.

With the Penguins needing to make up some ground in the standings, they can't afford to have too many more nights like this for Jarry. Better yet, they need Jarry to steal them some games like the goalie across the ice did tonight. 

THE ESSENTIALS

• Boxscore
• Live file
• Scoreboard
• Standings
• Statistics
• Schedule

THE HIGHLIGHTS

THE THREE STARS

As selected at PPG Paints Arena

1. Brady Tkachuk, Senators LW
2. Parker Kelly, Senators LW
3. Ridly Greig, Senators C

THE INJURIES

• Goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic is sidelined week-to-week with a lower-body injury sustained on Tuesday. He is on long-term injured reserve and cannot return until Nov. 19 at the earliest.

• Defenseman John Ludvig is out indefinitely with a concussion sustained in his NHL debut on Tuesday. He has not placed on injured reserve, the Penguins don't need the additional roster spot that would come from IR right now.

• Defenseman Will Butcher is sidelined with an undisclosed injury sustained at the end of last season. He has resumed skating with a group in a non-contact capacity. He will be put on waivers to be sent down to Wilkes-Barre once healthy. He is on season-opening injured reserve, so his cap hit does not count.

• Forward Raivis Ansons is dealing with an upper-body injury sustained in the last month of the AHL season. He has resumed skating on his own. He will also be re-assigned to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton once healthy and is also on season-opening injured reserve.

• Defenseman Mark Pysyk is out "longer-term" with a lower-body injury. He attended Penguins training camp on a professional tryout contract, and was released from the PTO on Oct. 9 along with the other unsigned PTOs. But Pysyk has been around the team since the start of the season, has a stall in the locker room, and has resumed skating on his own with the Penguins' skating coaches. He doesn't have a contract with the Penguins, but it sure looks like they have some kind of plan for him once he's healthy. Thursday's morning skate was his first "structured" skate," as Sullivan put it.

THE LINEUPS

Sullivan’s lines and pairings:

Jake Guentzel - Sidney Crosby - Bryan Rust
Reilly Smith - Evgeni Malkin - Rickard Rakell
Drew O'Connor - Lars Eller - Radim Zohorna
Matt Nieto - Noel Acciari - Jeff Carter

Ryan Graves - Kris Letang
Marcus Pettersson - Erik Karlsson
Ryan Shea - Chad Ruhwedel

And for D.J. Smith's Senators:

Brady Tkachuk - Tim Stutzle - Claude Giroux
Drake Batherson - Josh Norris - Vladimir Tarasenko
Dominik Kubalik - Ridly Greig - Mathieu Joseph
Parker Kelly - Rourke Chartier - Mark Kastelic

Jake Sanderson - Travis Hamonic
Jakob Chychrun - Jacob Bernard-Docker
Tyler Kleven - Nikolas Matinpalo

THE MULTIMEDIA

THE SCHEDULE

The Penguins had a scheduled off day on Sunday. Next game is Monday at 7:08 p.m. against the Ducks. Since Sunday was a day off, Monday's morning skate will be another full one.

THE CONTENT

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