Penguins 'keep pushing' after two disallowed goals, but fall short to Sabres

The officials at PPG Paints Arena on Saturday night were met with choruses of boos and chants on a number of occasions from the 18,256 fans in attendance in the Penguins' 3-1 loss to the Sabres.

Some jeers toward officials were unwarranted. Some were debatable. Others were more than earned.

The Sabres struck first on Saturday night after Alex Tuch's unscreened wrist shot from a distance that beat Tristan Jarry just 2:53 into the game:

"He got a breakaway and he was able to put it top corner," Jarry reflected. "We had a lot of pressure on him, he shot it where I thought he would."

To the Penguins' credit, they responded well and pushed back. They controlled much of the play from that point forward, and outshot the Sabres 17-8 in the first frame. That didn't include the two attempts that managed to get past Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, only to be called back after the Sabres won a coaches challenge.

The first came with just over four minutes left in the opening period. Sidney Crosby drove to the net, drawing Luukkonen over to his side of the net. He took a pass from Jake Guentzel on his backhand, and one-timed the pass back to Drew O'Connor, who snapped it into the open cage:

Beautiful goal, courtesy of that Crosby assist. Problem was that Crosby was offside, and it wasn't close. Fans in the building weren't happy about it, but it was obviously the right call.

Three minutes later, the Penguins appeared to get the equalizer again when Guentzel redirected a Crosby pass past Luukkonen. The Sabres challenged the goal for goaltender interference, and this goal came back too. But this call wasn't as clear-cut:

What the officials were looking at there is Guentzel backing into Luukkonen's head, knocking it to the left. The puck hadn't yet crossed the line but was in the air when Guentzel made contact with Luukkonen. Both players are moving toward each other, with Luukkonen inching forward as Guentzel backs backward and to his left a little quicker. Luukkonen is in the crease when he gets hit. With that established, here's a refresher what the rulebook says on goaltender interference

Goals should be disallowed only if: (1) an attacking player, either by his positioning or by contact, impairs the goalkeeper’s ability to move freely within his crease or defend his goal; or (2) an attacking player initiates intentional or deliberate contact with a goalkeeper, inside or outside of his goal crease. Incidental contact with a goalkeeper will be permitted, and resulting goals allowed, when such contact is initiated outside of the goal crease, provided the attacking player has made a reasonable effort to avoid such contact.

The first part of the rule seems irrelevant. Luukkonen was able to move within his crease and defend his goal. It's the "or" and the second part of the rule there that likely led to the goal coming back. If the contact by Guentzel was intentional -- whether it was in the blue paint or not, the goal comes back. But if the contact was incidental (which this seemed to be) and happens outside the crease (Guentzel was, for the most part) then the goal would only stand if officials determined the player made a reasonable attempt to avoid the contact. Given that Guentzel wasn't pushed and moving on his own, there could be an argument that he didn't make any attempt to avoid the contact. But there's also a gray area in determining what is "reasonable" if Guentzel was facing the opposite direction.

When the ruling was announced, Mike Sullivan's reaction was one of incredulous laughter:

“Well, I didn't think it was goalie interference," Sullivan said after the game. "Based on that decision, our coaching staff needs to take a long look at the criteria of our understanding of what it is. Jake’s in the white paint first and foremost. I get it, there's some contact with the goaltender in the blue, but for me, the puck’s going in the net anyway. We could talk about this forever. I don't agree with the call, and our coaching staff is going to have a long discussion on the criteria and trying to define it better, because that wasn't my understanding.”

Guentzel's reaction was a little more understanding.

"I just got his head there in the red (paint)," he said. "You could tell. I didn't mean to, but yeah. ... You just can't hit the goalie, it's pretty self-explanatory. It's not much, but you can see from the overhead. It's pretty close. The puck seemed like it was going to go in no matter what. It just happened, it's one of those things where there's nothing you can do."

Sabres coach Don Granato said that on both plays, the Sabres' video coaches sent the video down to the screen on the bench floor, and he thought, "absolutely, you have to challenge both of those."

"The offside was clear as day," Granato said. "I think (Luukkonen) getting hit in the head was pretty clear too. I think those were easy ones for everybody involved today."

Warranted or not, two potential tying goals getting called back so close together can be crushing. But it only served a galvanizing force for the Penguins.

"You've just got to keep pushing," Guentzel said of the reaction in the room after those calls. "I thought we actually played pretty well and had a lot of chances." 

Rickard Rakell called the disallowed goals a "tough bounce," but said that it "gave us momentum to keep going."

After a scoreless second period that saw both goaltenders stop some Grade-A chances, the Penguins opened the third period with an early penalty-kill, and it was the one objectively bad call the officials made. There was no gray area here. Jansen Harkins tried to clear the puck from the Penguins' end, but the puck went over the glass and out, which is a delay of game penalty. But replay will show that Harkins' shot hit the stick of Sabres defenseman Rasmus Dahlin and deflected out. But the officials didn't see the puck hit Dahlin's stick, so Harkins headed to the box. The NHL rulebook has a list of things coaches are able to challenge, and a botched puck over glass call isn't one of them. There wasn't anything the Penguins could do other than kill the penalty, and they did.

"It hit their guy," Harkins said. "I mean, it happens. They can't see everything. That's just the way it goes sometimes. It's frustrating."

The Penguins got a bit of a makeup call less than three minutes later. It's not too common to see two unrelated penalties called on a team at once to create a full, two-minute five-on-three power play, but the Penguins got one when Zemgus Girgensons slashed Guentzel and Connor Clifton interfered with Crosby. Rakell's goal on the two-man advantage was the equalizer:

Girgensons got the game-winner late in the third period with a redirect after Erik Karlsson and P.O Joseph left him unchallenged in font of the crease, with Karlsson deserting his spot to give Girgensons ample room:

The Penguins attempted to pull Jarry for the extra attacker in the final two minutes, but an offensive zone turnover from Rakell while Jarry was halfway off the ice set up Dahlin for a long-range shot into the empty net to put the game away.

The Penguins have had a number of games this season where they came away with a loss, but the message afterward is some variation of liking the way they played. This was one of those games where they genuinely played well enough to win. They outshot the Sabres 41-32, with those 41 shots being two shy of their season-high. They weren't bad shots, either They had 12 high-danger attempts to the Sabres' six, and all 12 of their attempts registered as shots on goal. Only one of them beat Luukkonen, in Rakell's tally. 

"I feel like we generated an exorbitant amount of scoring chances," Sullivan said. "I don’t know how many breakaways we had, I don’t know how many posts we hit. But we had a number of Grade-A looks, and the puck didn’t always go in the net for us. You can't always control that. But I thought from a from a team process standpoint, I thought the guys were competing hard. I thought we controlled territory. We did a lot of the things that we set out to accomplish. We just didn't win on the scoreboard.”

Moral victories are worth exactly zero points in the standings, which doesn't do the Penguins any well in a tight division race. The two points the Penguins gave up tonight could have tied them with the Devils for the second wild card spot in the Eastern Conference and moved them within two points of the Flyers for third in the division. It's that close.

This was a pretty unique game, with the way officiating played such a role over the course of the night. It's a positive that the Penguins responded each time the way they did. This was a 60-minute effort, with a hot goalie at the other end being a big outcome.

Save for a couple costly lapses, the Penguins played well. But they've got to find a way to make sure games like these translate on the scoreboard more often.

THE ESSENTIALS

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

THE HIGHLIGHTS

THE THREE STARS

As selected at PPG Paints Arena:

1. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, Sabres G
2. Zemgus Girgensons, Sabres LW
3. Rickard Rakell, Penguins RW

THE IN-GAME INJURIES

• Penguins: None

• Sabres: None

THE LINEUPS

Sullivan’s lines and pairings:

Jake Guentzel - Sidney Crosby - Rickard Rakell
Reilly Smith - Evgeni Malkin - Bryan Rust
Drew O'Connor - Lars Eller - Valtteri Puustinen
Jansen Harkins - Noel Acciari - Jeff Carter

Marcus Pettersson - Kris Letang
P.O Joseph - Erik Karlsson
Ryan Graves - Chad Ruhwedel

And for Don Granato's Sabres:

Jeff Skinner - Tage Thompson - Alex Tuch
JJ Peterka - Dylan Cozens - Jack Quinn
Jordan Greenway - Casey Mittelstadt - Zach Benson
Zemgus Girgensons - Peyton Krebs - Eric Robinson

Rasmus Dahlin - Henri Jokiharju
Owen Power - Erik Johnson
Mattias Samuelsson - Connor Clifton

THE SCHEDULE

The Penguins practice at noon at the Lemieux Complex on Sunday before flying to Philadelphia for Monday's game against the Flyers. I've got the trip.

THE FEED

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