PENGUINS

The Penguins knew they could have come into Thursday's game in Edmonton with a laundry list of excuses. They were on the second half of a back-to-back ... on the third game of a long western road trip ... playing a team with a ton of talent that has given them serious trouble in recent memory.

But instead of leaning into the excuses, they saw them as all the more reason to come out with a strong start and set the tone early in what ended up being a 6-2 win over the Oilers.

"There's plenty of things that you can have for excuses," Dan Muse said. "Travel, tired, all that. With our group, it's a huge credit to them. There was none of that. Those guys came out ready to go."

It wasn't just a good start -- the Penguins' first period had a historically-good stretch.

Tristan Jarry stopped the Penguins' first shot of the game from Noel Acciari 50 seconds in, and then the Penguins proceeded to score on their next three shots in a row. Anthony Mantha opened the scoring 2:20 into the game, going to the net and redirecting a pass from Justin Brazeau:

Then 22 seconds later, Brazeau set Mantha up for another one off a partial breakaway:

And 15 seconds after that, Sidney Crosby redirected a Ryan Shea shot to put the Penguins up 3-0:

The three goals in 37 seconds set a new Oilers franchise record for the fastest span that they've ever allowed three goals, and it was the third-fastest three goals in Penguins history, behind the time they did it in 27 seconds late in a game against the Blues in 1972 and 29 seconds in a rally against the Capitals in 1993.

Doing it like this, though, scoring that many goals so quickly to open a game and set the tone, just hadn't ever been done before.

"We were ready to play," Mantha said. "Back-to-backs, sometimes it's hard with the lack of sleep. But everyone -- no exceptions tonight -- played really good."

Crosby, too, seemed to brush off the magnitude of what they did in the first period. They just showed up with the right mindset, and it worked out for them.

"You know, Moe (Mantha) had a big shift there, got a couple of goals and gave us a boost," Crosby said. "We were just ready to play from the start, and sometimes it works out that way."

The game settled down after Crosby's goal, and the Oilers started to push. But late in the period it was the Penguins' defensemen who showed that they came ready to play too, stepping up with plays like Parker Wotherspoon's save at the goal line or Jack St. Ivany's massive blocked shot against the Oilers' top-ranked power play.

Edmonton proved to be opportunistic to open the second period. An Egor Chinakhov turnover on the power play turned into a shorthanded odd-man rush for Edmonton and ended with Jake Walman finding the back of Arturs Silovs' net. But the Penguins found their momentum again, and Rickard Rakell's shot from the left circle and Evgeni Malkin's breakaway goal extended the lead. Egor Chinakhov flashed his lazer-fast release for another goal in the third period, and Edmonton's Matt Savoie added another goal late to make it a 6-2 final.

Everyone -- the top-six forwards, the bottom-six forwards, their defensemen, their penalty-killers, and Silovs -- stepped up in this one. It's not necessarily anything new from any one of those parts of this group, but this game is an indication of that things can look like when everyone is clicking at the same time.

"Really liked the offensive execution," Muse said. "But I liked a lot of the things we were doing on the defensive side, just the way the guys were working, just the overall team game. ... There's a lot of things we put together, a lot of things that we've seen throughout the course of the year, but it was pretty consistent there tonight. I thought the tracking, the reloads, the way we had numbers back, our sticks were really good."

Of each of the Penguins' four stops on this road trip, this one presented the toughest challenge. The Oilers are the only team on this trip with a solid hold of a playoff spot, while the Kraken hover around the wild card spot, the Flames sink further out of the race and the Canucks continue to solidify their hold of the league's last-place spot. If the Penguins can beat the lowly Canucks on Sunday, they will sweep this trip and come back to Pittsburgh with a massive eight points.

For now, this win strengthened the Penguins' hold on the No. 2 spot in the Metropolitan Division, no longer in second on a tiebreaker but now with a two-point lead over the Islanders. They're creeping up on the first-place Hurricanes, now six points back with a game in hand.

As this trip continues, and the season continues to roll on, the significance of this win in particular could prove to be bigger than just those two points. This is solid evidence of what they're capable of against good teams, and that's something that they can benefit from in the future in a lot of situations.

"As you go through the course of the year, you have different things that you can always now go back to," Muse said. "For us, we should be gaining even more confidence. We know this is a great hockey team over there with great players. But on a back-to-back, when maybe you are a little bit tired, we'll be able to just stick with our focus being on our game, going out there and executing. All these types of games, you want to make sure you're carrying those lessons with you and then building confidence."