Pregame
The Penguins stick with the same skaters and line as last game and swap out goalies as they’ve done for every game so far in the season, putting Tristan Jarry in for the night.
First period
Minnesota strikes first, Ryan Shea and Kris Letang both get caught in space and slow to cover a player, turns out that’s bad when Kirill Kaprizov is involved. Don’t sleep on the pass velocity, timing and angle from Marcus Johansson either. 1-0 Wild.
The Penguins put the puck in the net, it’s Evgeni Malkin with a spinning shot. However, the refs announce that Justin Brazeau has committed goalie interference and the goal won’t stand. The Pens look at the replays and challenge. The refs aren’t changing their tune, no goal and Pittsburgh picks up a penalty for losing the challenge. Fortunately for them, they’re able to kill the penalty off.
Soon after, Bryan Rust gets called for a trip that looked more like a clean enough hit. The men in stripes certainly weren’t giving any favors out to the Pens early in this one, Pittsburgh’s PK keeps the score even to the end of the period.
Shots are 13-6 MIN in the first period. Pittsburgh lost a lot of momentum when they didn’t get credited with that goal and didn’t have much going on otherwise.
Second period
The Pens put the puck in the net with a player in/around the goal area — and this time it counts! Ville Koivunen got knocked down and honestly probably caused a bigger goalie distraction on this instance (a Shea shot) compared to the first play. No matter, this one isn’t getting called back, 1-1 game.
Pittsburgh gets rung up for a too many men, Kris Letang was going for a change, a player jumped on the ice and Letang stayed involved in the play by throwing a shoulder into an opponent, which is an easy call to make there. Pittsburgh again kills it off.
Pittsburgh out-shoots MIN 11-7 in the second period.
Third period
The Pens break the game open in the third, Bryan Rust continues his hot production by scoring in front of the net.
Less than a minute later, Pittsburgh gets their first power play of the night and they quickly score after some nice passing. Ben Kindel celebrates his 10th game in the NHL by putting the puck home. 3-1 game after two goals in 1:01 stretch.
Crosby gets called for a trip, clock is working against Minnesota and they can’t get anything going. Goalie gets pulled and Anthony Mantha caps off a 1:56 shift by scoring from way out into the open net. 4-1.
Some thoughts
- Dan Muse started the game by having Minnesota natives Blake Lizotte and Tommy Novak, as well as former Wild players Matt Dumba and Connor Dewar. Not the first time he’s made a sentimental one-off choice to open a game, a cool little touch. Not the biggest deal in the world, it’s a long season and finding ways to keep it interesting can’t be bad for the morale aspect to give the players some extra reason to get excited pre-game when reading off the starting lineup.
- Boy that Parker Wotherspoon is takin’ a lickin’ these days. He absorbed a shot block right into the body in the first, one of three on the night and threw 6 hits. Very sturdy player, seeing him game in and game out for a while now and he’s consistently physical, more than I expected or knew about. Nice little surprise
- So many of the little things (and not so little things) have broken Pittsburgh’s way to start the season, not getting the goal call in the first was not one among them. Brazeau barely touched goalie Filip Gustavsson, the defender Jacob Middleton made more contact with his own goalie than anything else. Even worse, with or without the ‘interference’ of Brazeau, Gustavsson still was the one who pushed himself out of position to his left and wasn’t going to be prepared to stop the shot coming to his right, so the play in question didn’t even hamper his ability to play his position…It also didn’t help optics that this might have been the shortest NHL challenge of just a few seconds to come to the final decision.
- Bad calls happen, they happen even more to the Pens when Garrett Rank is involved. As our Adam Gretz pointed out, Rank was the one ref that drove Mike Sullivan craziest. Many a questionable call that has gone against the Penguins, for whatever reason. Complaining about the refs is typically not something we like to do, it’s useless and pointless but in this case it’s notable considering the history involved.
- Random idea, and maybe a bad idea since it would slow the game down more: let the power play team choose the skater who has to serve a bench minor. The Pens had two this game, and Letang caused the penalty but Anthony Mantha ended up getting to serve it. Similarly, the delay of game for failed challenge put Tommy Novak in the box. Would make it a little more fun if Minnesota could have put Letang or Shea in the box, though figuring out who was on the ice and having the other coach potentially stall to come to a decision might not be in the game’s best interests.
- Mantha serving that penalty meant the Pens put Crosby in his spot with Malkin-Brazeau for a shift shortly after it, and that was cool too.
- Strong night for the Pittsburgh penalty kill going 4/4, especially considering Minnesota came into the game leading the circuit with a 31.8% power play. It didn’t look like a top-ranked power play tonight, which is a big credit to the PK efforts that got a ton of clears and didn’t offer many chances for them to get setup and operate.
- Here’s something you don’t see every day: Crosby 36% on 11 faceoffs and Malkin was 75% on eight draws through two periods. If anything, that line would usually be reversed. A lot of that can be QoC; Crosby saw a lot of Joel Eriksson Ek, Malkin got to deal with Marco Rossi and Ryan Hartman.
- As pointed out in the last recap, Mantha replaced Kindel on the top power play mid-game against the Flyers. Kindel was back in that spot tonight, quickly scoring, and yeah, I think he’ll be sticking there for a while longer after that.
- Four wins in a row for Jarry, another another stellar performance tonight with 27 saves on 28 shots. He had to be at his best early on, seeing 13 shots in the first period alone. The goalie rotation is undoubtedly working out, and heaven knows the Pens play frequently enough where even taking every-other-game is giving plenty of opportunities (Jarry has played three games in the last week), so there’s probably no need to tinker with what is working…Even though he’s been so good lately that the temptation might rise to give him more minutes. That’s easy enough to stave off so long as Arturs Silovs continues to do his part, yet as always it’s worth watching for the future.
- The Pens leave October with an 8-2-2 record and points in eight straight games. Good gravy, October was good to them.
Next up, a trip to Winnipeg on Saturday afternoon where the Pens will look to keep it going in the right direction.
