Positives abound for Penguins
The Big Macs were on Phil. Maybe the big goals will be, too, once the playoffs begin.
We could absolutely focus on the negative here. We could highlight all the glorious chances the Penguins surrendered when they should have been playing stingy, playoff-style hockey.
But that really wasn’t the story on a
night the club punched its playoff ticket with a 41 victory over the pesky Detroit Red Wings.
The bigger stories were these:
• The Penguins are getting healthy.
• Phil Kessel is heating up.
• Matt Murray is looking like a goaltender who could carry a team
— namely this one — deep into spring.
Let’s start with Kessel, who scored twice and now has three goals in the past two games. The first of those won everybody a free Big Mac and had the team’s 570th consecutive sellout crowd chanting “Thank You, Phil!”
That led to a shot of Kessel smiling on the bench. He was all smiles afterward, too, and that hasn’t often been the case this season.
“I’ve been cold,” Kessel said. “This year’s been a cold year for me in the goalscoring department. But it’s nice to get a couple.”
Shot of confidence, maybe? Especially that even-strength snap shot off an Evgeni Malkin faceoff win?
“I don’t know,” Kessel said “I missed some other ones tonight I probably shouldn’t have missed. I don’t know how confident I really am. But it’s nice to see it go in.”
It was nice to see Murray in top form again, too. He has been mostly brilliant for several months, if you ask me. His save percentages don’t lie: December, .959; January, .917; February, .920; March, .935.
Add it all up, and Murray is having a wonderful season. Going into the game, he was 10th in the NHL in save percentage at .919, and he will wind up making nearly 50 starts.
“When Matt is at his best,” coach Mike Sullivan said, “he makes difficult saves look routine. But they’re very difficult saves.”
The game-changer Thursday was a breakaway stop on the human swear word, Martin Frk, with the Red Wings already leading 1-0. Justin Schultz’s stick snapped, allowing Helm to skate in on Murray, who turned aside a backhanded attempt.
“He made a pretty good move,” Murray said. “I just tried to stay patient and got a piece of it with my blocker.”
Early in the second period, with the Penguins leading 2-1, Murray stood tall amid an avalanche of egregious turnovers and bad decisions in front of him. Kessel made one of those and got caught on the ice for what seemed like an hour. I thought it might take an Uber to get him back to the bench.
The Penguins’ defensive lapses never ceased. Somehow, off the opening faceoff of the third period, Detroit’s Dylan Larkin walked right down the slot on Murray, who stopped that one, too, and made 33 saves in all.
Fittingly, the game ended with Murray thwarting Frk on a 2-on-1.
Meanwhile, Kris Letang unexpectedly rejoined the lineup and looked like Kris Letang from the get-go. He logged 9:04 of ice time in the first period, easily the most of any skater on the ice. He finished at 25:52 and tied Patric Hornqvist with a gamehigh nine shots attempted.
“Big-time player,” Murray said of Letang. “The biggest thing is just the way he skates. He can join the rush and still be back on a turnover or whatever it may be. So his skating ability helps him to do pretty much everything out there.”
Malkin returned to the lineup, too — not a surprise — and kind of looked like Evgeni Malkin. That was especially true on a secondperiod shift when he bulled his way through a check in the neutral zone and then played a game of pass-andshoot with himself in the Wings’ end, nearly scoring on one of his patented spino-rama backhanders.
Kessel almost had the hat trick on an early thirdperiod power play, but his shot hit the post, then hit goalie Jimmy Howard’s back before sitting on the goal line. Sidney Crosby went after it like a man dying for a Big Mac and wound up in the net with the puck to snap a 10-game goal-less streak.
Another feel-good moment happened much earlier, when Jake Guentzel scored his 39th goal. Despite some hiccups, it was a night filled with feel-good moments as the Penguins now can prepare for the playoffs — and hopefully for the return of one more piece, defenseman Brian Dumoulin, before then.
Sullivan said this of Kessel, but he might as well have said of the team atlarge:
“His confidence has to be growing.”
Joe Starkey: jstarkey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @joestarkey1. Joe Starkey can be heard on the “Cook and Joe” show weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on 93.7 The Fan.