Yeah, I can appreciate that the Penguins finally stopped stomping on the snooze button and preserved a point before being buried by the Blue Jackets in the shootout, 5-4, tonight here at PPG Paints Arena. Two-goal rallies aren't easy, and stick-taps all around to Kris Letang and Bryan Rust for coming up clutch two minutes apart to force overtime.
But sorry, this wasn't it. None of this.
Not from the top down:
• Take this from someone who's been wholly supportive of Kyle Dubas' plan to stagger the usage of this team's two terrific teenagers, Ben Kindel and Harrison Brunicke: You don't need to scratch both at the same time, and you sure as hell don't need to do it on home ice in front of the paying public. Not with road games next week in Philadelphia, St. Paul and Winnipeg.
Come on. That's the kind of tone-deaf crap the Pirates do, and I don't apply the latter bar lightly.
The attendance on this night was 15,261, even with extra faithful visiting town to see the Steelers tomorrow night, and there's yet to be a single sellout here despite the Penguins' 6-2-1 start. That matters. Money matters. (Heck, it might matter more than we know given that payroll's still $13 million below the NHL's salary cap.) The fans believing in the product, including the future of the product ... all of that matters.
Rest the kids. Keep the kids here. Just don't be the Pirates about it.
• I'm not writing this because the Penguins lost. I'd have led the column with it regardless.
• To carry that further, the Penguins did not lose this game because they didn't dress Kindel or Brunicke, though I'm sure one or both would've helped. Rather, they lost because they took pretty much everything they'd done through their 6-2 start, flipped it upside-down and found out that doesn't exactly work well. Separate issue.
• It's a super-annoying issue, though, unto itself. The Blue Jackets had played the previous night, and the fresher team still got skated off the ice for about 50 of the evening's 65 minutes. That's not OK. Neither was Columbus running up a 41-30 advantage in shots, 75-60 in shot attempts, 14-7 in high-danger chances.
"I would say so," Dan Muse replied when asked if this was one of the Penguins' sloppier performances. "I thought we were on our heels, and there were some different things, if you go through the game. I thought early on that it was probably more execution-based. I think we're probably trying to do the right things, but we weren't executing."
“I think we just started to simplify a little bit,” Rust would say of the final few minutes. “We started to put pucks in the O-zone and just try and outwork them. And I think we needed a little bit more of that effort kind of throughout the whole game.”
Yep.
But it unmistakably wasn't there, and that was an unsettling season first.
• Neither was the tightness or the puck support that'd been in place from the opening shift at Madison Square Garden. Instead, it looked a lot like this:
Whatever ugliness befell poor Parker Wotherspoon behind the Pittsburgh net, the most painful part of Dmitri Voronkov's goal was how spread-all-over-creation the Penguins were. Something clearly was amiss for Wotherspoon, two Blue Jackets converged ... and the defenders were directionless.
If and when that reverts to the norm, it'll be fine.
• Yet again, Sidney Crosby essentially echoed what he'd told me that night at the Garden: “I think we feel like we’ve got another level. So we’ve got to find it.”
JEANINE LEECH / GETTY
The Blue Jackets' Adam Fantilli beats Arturs Silovs in the shootout Saturday night at PPG Paints Arena.
• Am I the only one who's tired of ignoring shootouts just because they're not part of the game?
If they're tabulated in the NHL standings, they're part of the game, right?
Well, as such, even if this is unfair to Arturs Silovs, I'm also tired of goaltenders incapable of carrying themselves professionally in these things, as was the case with all three of the Blue Jackets' shooters almost casuallyundressing Silovs to prevail in that session, 3-2.
Silovs afterward downplayed it as a "skill" event, and that's a common sentiment throughout the league. But it's also bunk. Those are real points that get squandered, and they're doubly important inside the division. He obviously wasn't around, but the Penguins lost their final four shootouts last season, going 1-6 in those, and this has been an issue forever.
• I'll bet Sergei Murashov stops at least one, yeah?
Not advocating for his promotion. (Yet.) Just saying.
• Silovs made several outstanding saves, but the propensity for failing to control rebounds continues unabated. And mostly for that reason, for me, Tristan Jarry's been the Penguins' clear best in the crease to date. He's been excellent in every way.
• Awesome to see Rust finally score, as he'll tend to do that in big bunches. At the same time, awful to see Rickard Rakell having his left arm checked on the bench after a shot block, then leaving through the tunnel. We'll see how that goes. First line's really yet to find full throttle in the early going.
• Ville Koivunen from Owen Pickering in overtime?
Yes, please:
I mean, WOW ... what a shot!
That's 7-0 now for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton following a 3-2 victory on this night in Charlotte, N.C., that's four goals and seven assists in six games for Koivunen, that's four points and a plus-4 for Pickering, four goals for Tristan Broz, not to mention five points and a team-best plus-7 rating for a maybe-revived Ryan Graves and ... soon enough.
• Don't hate me for this, but ... beginning in the 2019-20 NHL season, 13 teams started with a 7-2 record or better and, of those, only the 2023-24 Red Wings missed the Stanley Cup playoffs. That's a 92.3 percent rate of qualifying.
• A rebound's needed Monday against the Blues. Can't drag stuff like this onto the road.
• Sure can take the kids along, though. And play them, too, for all those friendly faces at the wrong end of the commonwealth.
THE ASYLUM
DK: Scratch both kids? Same game? At home? Why?
Yeah, I can appreciate that the Penguins finally stopped stomping on the snooze button and preserved a point before being buried by the Blue Jackets in the shootout, 5-4, tonight here at PPG Paints Arena. Two-goal rallies aren't easy, and stick-taps all around to Kris Letang and Bryan Rust for coming up clutch two minutes apart to force overtime.
But sorry, this wasn't it. None of this.
Not from the top down:
• Take this from someone who's been wholly supportive of Kyle Dubas' plan to stagger the usage of this team's two terrific teenagers, Ben Kindel and Harrison Brunicke: You don't need to scratch both at the same time, and you sure as hell don't need to do it on home ice in front of the paying public. Not with road games next week in Philadelphia, St. Paul and Winnipeg.
Come on. That's the kind of tone-deaf crap the Pirates do, and I don't apply the latter bar lightly.
The attendance on this night was 15,261, even with extra faithful visiting town to see the Steelers tomorrow night, and there's yet to be a single sellout here despite the Penguins' 6-2-1 start. That matters. Money matters. (Heck, it might matter more than we know given that payroll's still $13 million below the NHL's salary cap.) The fans believing in the product, including the future of the product ... all of that matters.
Rest the kids. Keep the kids here. Just don't be the Pirates about it.
• I'm not writing this because the Penguins lost. I'd have led the column with it regardless.
• To carry that further, the Penguins did not lose this game because they didn't dress Kindel or Brunicke, though I'm sure one or both would've helped. Rather, they lost because they took pretty much everything they'd done through their 6-2 start, flipped it upside-down and found out that doesn't exactly work well. Separate issue.
• It's a super-annoying issue, though, unto itself. The Blue Jackets had played the previous night, and the fresher team still got skated off the ice for about 50 of the evening's 65 minutes. That's not OK. Neither was Columbus running up a 41-30 advantage in shots, 75-60 in shot attempts, 14-7 in high-danger chances.
"I would say so," Dan Muse replied when asked if this was one of the Penguins' sloppier performances. "I thought we were on our heels, and there were some different things, if you go through the game. I thought early on that it was probably more execution-based. I think we're probably trying to do the right things, but we weren't executing."
“I think we just started to simplify a little bit,” Rust would say of the final few minutes. “We started to put pucks in the O-zone and just try and outwork them. And I think we needed a little bit more of that effort kind of throughout the whole game.”
Yep.
But it unmistakably wasn't there, and that was an unsettling season first.
• Neither was the tightness or the puck support that'd been in place from the opening shift at Madison Square Garden. Instead, it looked a lot like this:
Whatever ugliness befell poor Parker Wotherspoon behind the Pittsburgh net, the most painful part of Dmitri Voronkov's goal was how spread-all-over-creation the Penguins were. Something clearly was amiss for Wotherspoon, two Blue Jackets converged ... and the defenders were directionless.
If and when that reverts to the norm, it'll be fine.
• Yet again, Sidney Crosby essentially echoed what he'd told me that night at the Garden: “I think we feel like we’ve got another level. So we’ve got to find it.”
JEANINE LEECH / GETTY
The Blue Jackets' Adam Fantilli beats Arturs Silovs in the shootout Saturday night at PPG Paints Arena.
• Am I the only one who's tired of ignoring shootouts just because they're not part of the game?
If they're tabulated in the NHL standings, they're part of the game, right?
Well, as such, even if this is unfair to Arturs Silovs, I'm also tired of goaltenders incapable of carrying themselves professionally in these things, as was the case with all three of the Blue Jackets' shooters almost casually undressing Silovs to prevail in that session, 3-2.
Silovs afterward downplayed it as a "skill" event, and that's a common sentiment throughout the league. But it's also bunk. Those are real points that get squandered, and they're doubly important inside the division. He obviously wasn't around, but the Penguins lost their final four shootouts last season, going 1-6 in those, and this has been an issue forever.
• I'll bet Sergei Murashov stops at least one, yeah?
Not advocating for his promotion. (Yet.) Just saying.
• Silovs made several outstanding saves, but the propensity for failing to control rebounds continues unabated. And mostly for that reason, for me, Tristan Jarry's been the Penguins' clear best in the crease to date. He's been excellent in every way.
• Awesome to see Rust finally score, as he'll tend to do that in big bunches. At the same time, awful to see Rickard Rakell having his left arm checked on the bench after a shot block, then leaving through the tunnel. We'll see how that goes. First line's really yet to find full throttle in the early going.
• Ville Koivunen from Owen Pickering in overtime?
Yes, please:
I mean, WOW ... what a shot!
That's 7-0 now for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton following a 3-2 victory on this night in Charlotte, N.C., that's four goals and seven assists in six games for Koivunen, that's four points and a plus-4 for Pickering, four goals for Tristan Broz, not to mention five points and a team-best plus-7 rating for a maybe-revived Ryan Graves and ... soon enough.
• Don't hate me for this, but ... beginning in the 2019-20 NHL season, 13 teams started with a 7-2 record or better and, of those, only the 2023-24 Red Wings missed the Stanley Cup playoffs. That's a 92.3 percent rate of qualifying.
• A rebound's needed Monday against the Blues. Can't drag stuff like this onto the road.
• Sure can take the kids along, though. And play them, too, for all those friendly faces at the wrong end of the commonwealth.
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