EDMONTON, Alberta — The Penguins’ four-game western road trip started on an exceptionally high note, rallying twice to beat the league-leading Canucks in overtime, 4-3.
The beginning of the trip was a good start to proving to Kyle Dubas that the Penguins have the chance to be contenders this postseason. What transpired over the remainder of the trip — culminating in a blowout 6-1 loss to the Oilers Sunday night here in Edmonton, Alberta — showed that hope might be gone on this season after all.
Penguins followed up that initial win in Vancouver with a narrow 2-0 loss to the Kraken in Seattle, when a hot start was erased by a bad, weird bounce the Kraken capitalized on. The third game of the trip, Saturday in Calgary, was when things started to really get bad. The Penguins blew a lead entering the third-period for the fifth time this season, squandering a two-goal lead with “egregious mistakes” in the final 10 minutes of regulation to lose in regulation, 4-3.
What happened on Sunday was an embarrassment.
“It’s tough right now,” Marcus Petterson said. “It really, really stinks right now. It’s a gut-wrenching feeling.”
The Penguins went down 6-0 before a late goal from Evgeni Malkin off a bad bounce from a Reilly Smith pass got the Penguins on the board and snapped backup goaltender Calvin Pickard’s shutout. Even if the Penguins had managed to solve Pickard earlier, the Grade-A chances they were allowing themselves dug themselves into a deep hole.
Oilers’ lone goal in the first period was a preview of what was to transpire the rest of the game. Erik Karlsson turned the puck over in the Oilers’ end, leading to a two-on-one rush with Connor McDavid and Zach Hyman heading the other way, with Pettersson as the only man back. Nedeljkovic stopped McDavid, but he couldn’t stop Hyman with the rebound:
managed to get worse in the second period, with the Oilers getting a three -on-one rush against Kris Letang, ending with Corey Perry getting one past Nedeljkovic:
Hyman added to the lead later in the second when he took advantage of a bouncing puck. Ryan McLeod made it 4-0 with 1:13 left in the second period with a shot from the goal line that snuck over the shoulder of Nedeljkovic, and Cody Ceci made it 4-0 only 23 seconds later with a shot through traffic. McDavid scored the Oilers’ sixth goal in the third period off of a rebound.
“Too many odd-man rushes,” Letang told me of the difference in this game. “We gave them three-on-one, two-on-one a few times. When they have that much skill, eventually they’ll make you pay.”
Mike Sullivan was asked why the Oilers were able to get so many odd-man rushes against the Penguins and capitalize on a few.
“Well, No. 1, because they’re really good at it,” he said. “So you’ve got to give their players credit. They’ve got one of the most dynamic rush teams in the league, for obvious reasons, with some of the people that they have and the speed that they have. I think in certain instances, a lot of it just boils down to details and staying above people and staying above the puck. When there’s a puck battle in the top half of the zone or top of the circles or the hash marks, if our defenseman are going to go down the wall to try to keep the puck alive, we need a forward to replace him and reload above on the inside. When they don’t, if we don’t win the puck battle, then it’s obviously an odd-man rush. That happened on a couple of occasions tonight, where that just boils down to discipline and detail.”
Beyond the odd-man rushes, though, what happened to make this game fall apart the way it did?
“I just think we got outplayed,” Sullivan said. “We just got outplayed.”
Aside from a pretty evenly-matched early part of the first period, the Penguins just looked tired. Sure, they were on the second half of a back-to-back and a long road trip, but the Oilers played the night before too on the road in Seattle. Nedeljkovic mentioned the team getting into Edmonton from Calgary at 3 or 4 a.m. as a factor — one the Oilers didn’t have to deal with since their game against the Kraken was an afternoon game. But it’s hard to imagine a couple hours of sleep was the difference-maker here.
With less than a week until the March 8 trade deadline, the Penguins haven’t done much to show that it’s worth adding to this team at the trade deadline in any way. Even considering the injuries to Jake Guentzel and Bryan Rust — no small losses at all — the Penguins haven’t managed to show that they’re capable of making the playoffs, let alone winning multiple seven-game series.
