Little reason to celebrate
Crosby ties Lemieux’s franchise record of 915 games, but Florida wins in overtime
SUNRISE, Fla. — If you flicked on the television Thursday night with questions regarding the Penguins’ identity, you’re hardly alone.
They, too, are still trying to figure out who they are, what they can count on and what exactly is their calling card now that we’re officially twothirds of the way through the 2018-19 season.
It’s also likely none of those questions were answered during a 3-2 overtime loss against the Florida Panthers at BB&T Center, the Penguins’ third consecutive defeat and one that dropped them to 5-7-1 since an eightgame winning streak.
“I think we’re working toward it,” captain Sidney Crosby said of the Penguins developing an identity. “I think it’s something that we all have in the back of our minds.”
The Penguins have shown stretches of being an elite team, one absolutely capable of competing with the best in the Eastern Conference. Shoot, they’ve even beaten a couple of those top-tier teams. Handily, too.
Then, this. When they’re celebrating juicing a point out of a Panthers club that’s a mile away from the playoff picture and openly talking about stockpiling draft picks and salary-cap space for next season and beyond.
Much like the Penguins have been for the better part of the past month, this game was all over the place, starting from the drop of the puck.
The Penguins fell into a 10 hole when Evgenii Dadonov finished a Mike Matheson shot that sailed high and wide. It was another power-play goal allowed for a Penguins penalty kill that had just gotten over a fivegame stretch where it had killed just eight of 15.
The Penguins also failed to do much of anything with a boatload of power-play time straddling the first and second periods, 58 seconds of it coming five-on-three.
“You get almost a minute of five-on-three time, you expect to score,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said. Sullivan also bemoaned losing a 50/50 puck battle off the faceoff that cost the Penguins 20-25 seconds.
“If we win the puck battle, maybe we get an opportunity to get a couple more [scoring chances],” Sullivan said.
But the scary part of that is this: For as loaded as the Penguins are with offensive talent, the power play sure has struggled a bunch lately. The zero-for-three performance Thursday dropped it to one for 18 over the past six games.
“We have to execute,” Crosby said. “That’s what it comes down to. For whatever reason, we’re not executing.”
There’s also line structure. Or, really, a lack of it.
With Evgeni Malkin out, Matt Cullen centered a second line that struggled to possess the puck more than 20 percent of the time five-on-five for the first two periods — or until Sullivan broke it up.
With a third of the season to go, it’s safe to say there are plenty of jobs and roles up for grabs in the Penguins’ top-nine, with Tanner Pearson — acquired to hold down one of them — again failing to fire a single shot on goal.
The start as a whole was an issue for the Penguins in this one.
While Sullivan bristled at the idea this has become a trend — he’s right, as the Penguins lead the NHL in first-period goal differential at plus-16 — they didn’t come out flying against Florida.
At minimum, the Penguins struggled to hold serve while facing a team that had blown a two-goal lead in the third period just 48 hours before.
“We weren’t good enough for the whole game,” Bryan Rust said. “But we fought back really hard.”
Rust, like Sullivan on the first-period stuff, is right. The Penguins did fight back, and how they did it should be seen as encouraging.
It was also commendable that Casey DeSmith, starting for the injured Matt Murray, didn’t seem to have his best stuff but fought through it well enough to stop 39 of 42 shots.
New addition Jared McCann centered a third line that played to a 65 percent five-on-five shot share, and he wound up scoring his first goal as a Penguin, a short-handed tally in the second period.
Meanwhile, Marcus Pettersson picked up his first goal as a Penguin in the third, pumping a shot through from the point.
If you’re looking for an identity, resilience never hurts.
Ditto for goals from nontraditional sources.
But then came overtime. Despite having more than enough skill on their roster, the Penguins haven’t been a very good team once games advance past regulation this season.
This loss dropped them to 5-7 when a game needs more than 60 minutes to produce an outcome. In games that end via three-on-three, the Penguins are 4-5.
“It’s a big point. That’s what I told the guys afterward,” Sullivan said. “We’re disappointed we didn’t earn the extra one in the overtime because we’re capable in that situation.
“We have what we think is real good personnel for three-on-three overtime. For whatever reason, we haven’t fared as well this year in that aspect of our team game.”
Of course, there’s no three-on-three in the playoffs.
Then again, that might not matter to the Penguins — who are just three points away from tumbling out of the playoff picture — if they don’t stop spinning their wheels and kick it into gear here soon.
“We want to make sure that we’re playing the same way every night,” Crosby said. “We know what that is. It’s another thing to do it. We’ve got to put games together and find a way to do that consistently.”