Wake-up alarm goes off
Penguins sleeping giants no more, rout Wild
Over the past few weeks, the Penguins have started showing flashes of their old selves, the team that won back-to-back Stanley Cups.
Against the Minnesota Wild Thursday night, it was more than just a flash.
With the exception of a brief blip in the third period, the Penguins absolutely dominate Minnesota, winning, 6-3, and looking every bit like they’ve turn a real corner heading into the All-Star break this weekend.
“You want to continue that momentum,” Sidney Crosby said. “We have a few days off here. We’ve been playing the right way here for a couple weeks. We’ve had great results. Everybody’s chipping in. That’s a big part of it. Because of that, it’s a lot more fun to play, and more pucks are going in the net.”
Against the Wild, the Penguins got some of that balanced scoring they crave. The stars did their part — with Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Phil Kessel getting three points apiece — and the scoring depth kicked in, with Dominik Simon, Carl Hagelin and Brian Dumoulin accounting for four of the six goals.
“That’s the type of team we want to be,” Hagelin said. “We have a lot of guys that have been around a long time, guys that have put up points before. We want to be a four-line team, just rolling and creating offense every single shift.”
Coach Mike Sullivan said he thought this was the best the Penguins have been able to use their whole lineup in a while. It’s also not a coincidence that they jumped ahead early — with Simon opening the scoring 3:54 into the first — and kept pouring it on from there.
“When there are nights when we shorten the bench and we
lean on guys, I think it’s hard for us to maintain the tempo that gives us a competitive advantage,” Sullivan said. “So, when we have the ability to use four lines and get some minutes down a little bit for some of our top players, I think we get better returns from our top players because they have more juice.”
The top players certainly had that extra burst against the Wild.
Malkin had two goals and an assist, and Kessel and Crosby had three assists each. Crosby’s first gave him 1,080 career points, moving him ahead of Jaromir Jagr and into second place on the Penguins’ all-time scoring list.
The assist came on the first of two goals for Simon, who seems to have taken up the position previously occupied by Conor Sheary and Jake Guentzel as the young Wilkes-Barre/Scranton winger who comes up and catches fire on Crosby’s wing.
But his continued scoring run was hardly the only positive sign for the Penguins Thursday night. They smothered the Wild nearly from start to finish, with Casey DeSmith stopping all 13 shots he faced in the first two periods as the Penguins build a 4-0 lead heading into the third.
The Penguins even got some puck luck for the first time in what seems like ages, too. Malkin’s first goal bounced in off the skate of Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk, and his second deflected in off Minnesota’s Eric Staal.
“Especially early on in the game, especially at home, it gets the fans going,” Hagelin said. “It’s annoying as a road team, too, to give up those types of goals. We fed off that.”
If there was any negative, it came in the third period, as the Penguins gave up three goals in a little more than three minutes to let the Wild pull back to within semi-reasonable striking distance.
But Sullivan flipped that into a positive. The Penguins didn’t panic and salted away the final 8:14 to seal the win.
“I liked our pushback,” he said. “I thought we settled back into the game after that flurry occurred, which I think is probably the most important takeaway. There was no panic. It was just, ‘OK, let’s get back to playing the game the right way.’”
The Penguins need to keep that up when they return from the break.
Even though they’ve improved their position in the standings over the course of an 8-3-0 January so far — they temporarily vaulted themselves into second place in the Metropolitan Division when the final horn blew — they still don’t exactly have a ton of breathing room. But they’ll also enjoy the wins as they come, especially ones as satisfying as Thursday night.
“It’s nice to get rewarded,” Crosby said. “We know it takes a lot of hard work and paying attention to details. It’s great to get those kind of results when you do that. Like I said, these are important points. We have to continue to play the same way hereafter the break.”