PENGUINS DRAW FIRST BLOOD
Held to 12 shots at home, the Penguins still found a way to beat the Predators in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final
“It shows that we can play our worst hockey and still get the win.” — Conor Sheary
TPITTSBURGH hey don’t ask how. They don’t even ask how many. All they ask is if you won. Maybe that’s the way the Pittsburgh Penguins should look at their 5-3 win against the Nashville Predators in Monday’s Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final.
This one wasn’t pretty. After taking a 3-0 lead in the first period, Pittsburgh gave up three straight goals when they went 36 minutes and 43 seconds without a shot on net. With 3:17 remaining in the third period, Penguins forward Jake Guentzel scored the winner on just their seventh shot of the game.
“It was a little weird, but we’re just happy to get one at this time of year,” Pittsburgh winger Conor Sheary said. “It shows that we can play our worst hockey and still get the win.”
Opportunistic does not begin to describe this one. The Pens scored five goals on just 12 shots. Nashville goalie Pekka Rinne faced so little action in the second and for most of the third period that he could have been reading a book or sitting back in the dressing room watching the game on TV.
Maybe that’s why he couldn’t get a piece of the puck on the winner. Going nearly two periods without seeing any rubber would make any goalie go cold. Still, it was a bullet from a rookie who has gained a reputation for scoring big-time goals in these playoffs, and it was long overdue.
Guentzel leads the playoffs with 10 goals, but he went the entire third round without scoring. His stick had gone so cold lately that he had been dropped down to the fourth line and, with Patric Hornqvist returning to the lineup, there was even speculation whether Guentzel would be a healthy scratch.
But Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan had faith that the winger would come through.
“He’s been an important part of this playoff run,” Sheary said of Guentzel. “The fact that he didn’t get one in the last round was a bit surprising.”
“You just have to stay positive,” Guentzel said. “When you’re getting your chances and it’s just not going, you just have to stay with it.”
That might have been what Nashville’s players were telling themselves. This was one that the Predators, who outshot the Penguins 26-12, should have had. But the hockey gods had other ideas.
Seven minutes in, P.K. Subban took a pass in the slot from Filip Forsberg and beat goalie Matt Murray with a wrist shot. The celebration was short-lived as a coach’s challenge revealed Forsberg had been offside earlier on the play.
If the Predators had played with confidence leading up to that goal, having it disallowed had the opposite effect.
Nashville looked rattled. Moments later, the Preds’ Calle Jarnkrok and James Neal combined to take penalties, giving Pittsburgh a five-onthree. With the two-man advantage, Evgeni Malkin continued to make a case for the Conn Smythe Trophy by blasting a slap shot through Rinne’s glove.
Sheary and Nick Bonino added two more before the end of the period. And just like that, the Preds went from being up 1-0 to going down 3-0 after the Pens scored three goals in four minutes and 11 seconds.
And yet, it wasn’t as dominant an effort as the score made it seem. Pittsburgh, which scored three times on eight shots in the first period, had no shots in the entire second period and just four in the third.
“I thought our guys played great,” Predators head coach Peter Laviolette said. “I knew we were doing a good job defensively, but I wasn’t looking at the time (that Pittsburgh had gone without a shot).”
Shortly after a fan threw a catfish onto the ice — a tradition at home games in Nashville — the Predators scored a power-play goal when Ryan Ellis one-timed a pass from Subban.
In the third period, with the Penguins unable to get the puck on net, the Preds tied it on goals from Colton Sissons and Frederick Gaudreau. Gaudreau’s came just after the Preds killed off a Subban delay-of-game penalty.
“You never think you’re going to blow a three-goal lead,” Bonino said. “But we knew it was coming, and then Jake saved us there.”
With the Penguins telling themselves that they needed to get a shot — “We were definitely yelling for everybody to shoot,” Sheary said — Matt Cullen fed Guentzel up the ice with a pass. The 22-year-old did the rest.
When the Penguins added an empty-netter a couple of minutes later, no one was looking at the shot counter. They were just looking at the score.