Penguins eye better results on road
season stretch to .549 in 2016-17.
Through four road games this season, the Penguins haven’t been the dominant road team they would like to be. They’ve certainly shown a few flashes, but the biggest challenge remains achieving consistency, especially on the second night of a back-to-back set with travel involved.
“When you’re on the road, you have to have that extra urgency and desperation, knowing you’re going to get teams’ best,” Sidney Crosby said. “You have to find that extra level when you might be fatigued. It’s all about executing.
“You want to make sure that you’re good on the road. We’ve got to find ways to be better there.”
So, with that in mind, how can the Penguins — who Tuesday began a stretch where 10 of their 14 games are on the road — get better playing away from home? Hereare a few items:
• The first thing that’s starting to become a disturbing trend with the Penguins is the number of penalties taken, especially stick-related infractions.
Entering Wednesday, the Penguins led the NHL in three key categories: number of times short-handed (35), penalties taken (44) and minor penalties taken (39). Their amount of time shorthanded — 17:08 — was second from the top, pretty much exactly where you don’twant to be.
Worse, of those 39 minors, 25 were for hooking, tripping, slashing, cross-checkingor high-sticking.
“In the last handful of games, we’ve taken a fair amount of stick infractions,” Sullivan said after the Penguins home win Saturday against the Florida Panthers, who double as the opponent Friday night at BB&T Center. “We have to have more of a heightened awareness of how we’re utilizing our sticks to check.
“It’s something that we will discuss daily until we startto show more discipline in that area of the game. … It’s a discipline that we all have to start to establish.”
• Another issue the Penguins will want to correct is something that stung them at times last season, too: Second-periodgoals allowed.
The Penguins gave up 81 a season ago. Only six teams allowedmore.
Already this season, the Penguins have allowed an NHL-worst 13 second-period goals, with 10 coming on the road. It’s not even that 10-1 loss in Chicago that skewed the total, either; they’ve allowed three second-period goals — the number they gave up at United Center — three times, including Tuesday at Madison Square Garden.
• Though they admittedly got a huge five-on-three kill Tuesday, the number of penalties taken has brought the penalty kill back down to Earth. And maybe that was inevitable, given the personnel losses (Nick Bonino and MattCullen) this offseason.
But the Penguins have been short-handed 16 times over the past three games and responded by allowing five power-play goals. They’ve also allowed multiple power-play goals in their pasttwo road games.
“It’s tough to win on the road in this league,” Justin Schultz said. “You have to be readyto play.”
• For the Penguins, that means playing with speed, which is something Schultz and others recited over and over as one of the keys to becoming a good road team. Another was to keep thingssimple.
“We don’t need to think that we’re going to win in the first few shifts or in the first period,” Kris Letang said. “We just have to play a simple game and grind teams downwith our speed.”
Notice what the Penguins did Tuesday. Sure, the second-period lull was there, but they started strong and did so by keeping it simple andusing their legs.
“We’re trying to play to our strengths,” Sullivan said. “There is an element of simplifying the game early on when you play on the road to try and take maybe some of the momentum of the home team away or take someof the crowd out of it.”
• Sullivan has talked frequently this season about “playing a 200-foot game,” and it’s more than coachspeak. The Penguins have a highly skilled team and, by nature, live on the edge when it comes to taking risks entering the neutral zone.
Tamping down the number of transition chances would be beneficial, especially for a team whose possession numbers take a serious hit away from home — 51.4 Corsi For Percentage (CF%) at PPG Paints Arena compared to 45.5 on the road duringfive-on-five situations.
“I think it’s important that we simplify our game and we force teams to have to play that 200-foot game that we talk about,” Sullivan said. “If we’re going to get the results on the road that will live up to our expectation, all of those elements need to be there as partof our game.”
If the Penguins are looking for a template, they need not look any further than last season.
After starting out 13-11-5 away from PPG Paints Arena in 2016-17, the Penguins went 6-2-2 in a key 10game road stretch that led into two meaningless games at the end of the regular season.
You know what followed, especially two of their most thorough performances of the postseason in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals at Washington and Game 6 of the Stanley Cupfinal in Nashville.
The lesson learned there is that this sort of thing — fixing penalty-prone habits, playing a 60-minute game, being diligent with the puck — tends to require the smoothing of rough edges. It’s a little too easy to assume ithappens right away.
“I think it takes time for teams to get to build and develop the game that they’re trying to play,” Sullivan said. “Usually, it’s the play away from the puck that takes a little bit longer, because everybody has to cooperate and work together. My experience has been that as the season progresses, team defense league-wide gets better. By nature of that, goals areharder to come by.”