On Tuesday night, the red-hot Tampa Bay Lightning extended their winning streak to 11 games after defeating the Pittsburgh Penguins in the shootout 2-1 at PPG Paints Arena.
“I thought we played well,” Bryan Rust said. “I don’t think we gave them too many good looks (against) a team with that many skilled players who can score a lot of goals (and) has been on a bit of a run here. To kind of limit them five on five, especially to not allow a ton of good chances, I thought we played really well. We got a lot of chances of our own. We just need to score on a few of those.”
Before the game, the team announced that defenseman Erik Karlsson would be out for a minimum of two weeks with a lower-body injury. As a result, Jack. St. Ivany played alongside Parker Wotherspoon while Brett Kulak and Kris Letang got elevated to the top pairing.
While no one can replace Karlsson, it was going to have to be by committee to fill in the gaps with his absence. On Tuesday night, the team played well enough to limit Tampa’s offense, which has scored at least four goals in every game on their winning streak coming into Tuesday.
“I thought they were great,” Rust said on the team’s defense. “(The Lightning has) got a whole lot of skill and they can make a lot of plays and we didn’t give them a whole lot. Got to give a lot of credit to our defensemen. They all played really hard and really well tonight.”
Through the first 40-minutes of play, both Andrei Vasilevskiy and Arturs Silovs stood tall for their teams in between the pipes. Pittsburgh was unable to capitalize on their three power play opportunities in the game. While the chances were certainly there, the former Vezina trophy winner came up with save after save.
“I think that both goalies were pretty outstanding tonight, the defense, too,” Kris Letang said. “It was a pretty tight defensive game. It’s one of those where you flip a coin.”
“I thought Vasilevskiy just kind of was there,” Brett Kulak said. “He was just a brick wall for them on most of our scoring chances. But I thought we had a good game.”
For the Penguins, their defensive play has been outstanding since coming back from the holiday break. With arguably their toughest task against the Lightning, the Penguins were aware of how dangerous their offense can be.
“They have so much speed going into the neutral zone,” Letang said. “You try to clog the neutral zone and make sure that they don’t enter with too much speed and control. You want to make them chip the puck so they have to beat us on the forecheck.”
To start the third period, Connor Clifton laid a huge hit on Lightning forward Brandon Hagel. After the play, Clifton got into a fight with Anthony Cirelli and was assessed a five-minute penalty for boarding.
“Obviously, I’m committed to the hit,” Clifton said. “I watched it live on the iPad after. I got him from behind, obviously. I feel like I committed and he kind of chipped it in instead of coming around and trying to enter the zone with the puck, which I thought he would. Unfortunate, but we ended up killing it off.”
After all the penalties expired, both teams were looking for answers to break the scoreless game.
With just under seven minutes left in regulation, Tampa was able to get the first goal of the contest after J.J. Moser jammed in the rebound for the puck to get behind Silovs.
“I was kind of looking at the ref thinking maybe there was a call up ice and I looked over and, next thing I know, the puck was in the net,” Kulak said. “So, I had to watch the video back to kind of see what happened there. Strange play, but that's hockey. It happens."
While the Penguins’ offense has struggled to produce over the past few games, they got a huge goal from Evgeni Malkin to tie the game late in regulation with the goaltender pulled, sending it into overtime.
The Penguins came close to winning the game when Rust had a grade-A chance on the breakaway, followed up with more offensive pressure, but Vasilevskiy was there each time.
In the shootout, Egor Chinakhov was able to rip a shot five-hole to score, but Gage Goncalves and Nikita Kucherov were able to beat Silovs for the win.
“I mean, we had our chances to win it,” Letang said. “Obviously, [Vasilevskiy] made big saves. When you go to the shootout, you never know what’s going to happen. But I think that he was outstanding tonight for them.”
While the team hasn’t gotten the results that they wanted over these past three games, there are a lot of positives to take away moving forward. Pittsburgh will look to regroup with practice on Wednesday and gear up for their matchup against the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday at PPG Paints Arena.
“You have to pluck out what was good,” Kulak said. “I think that's been the case the last couple games, where we haven't come out on the right side of things, but we're pretty happy with our quality of play. We just know things are going to start coming and the wins are going to start racking up for us."
More from Head Coach Dan Muse on Tuesday’s game against Tampa:
I think everyone in the room is pretty happy with the defensive effort tonight, but only two goals scored in the last three games. Is there anything that you think this team can be doing in terms of strategy, whatever offensively, to generate more offense that they're not doing the last three games?: We’ve talked about a little bit, I feel like, over these last couple. It’s getting to the inside. That's a team that makes it hard. I think it's easy for somebody to say, you got to get there. And I think it's looking at other ways that maybe we can do a better job of getting inside position on their defense, because they make it tough. Teams are going to make it tough. And so, I think there's things that we can look at and talk about, but yeah, we need to generate more around the net, more second chances. And we were there at times, for sure. But there were other ones I think we're going to go back and we'll look at and say, ‘okay, there was maybe some missed opportunities to get a puck to the net when we didhave somebody there, or there's a missed opportunity to stay around the net longer when those rebounds are there.’ And so, I think we got to increase the number of looks that we have in those areas. Coming back off the break, there's been stretches where it feels like the goals are coming a little bit more, a little easier. These last few, it's been tougher. It's been tougher to get to the inside. And so, we're going to look at that, and obviously, it's something that we got to work to correct.
How do you think your defenseman performed in trying to compensate for Erik’s absence tonight?: I thought the whole group, they worked. On the defensive side of it, I thought we were working above. I think we were working to do the right things. There’s still a couple situations off the rush that we’ll continue to work to clean up in terms of allowing odd-man (rushes) or time and space coming in. But I thought that part of it was better. And we talked about needing it by committee. And I thought that was a good start.
Just what did you see on Tampa’s goal there? Seemed like there was a little bit of time there where there might have been a whistle. Did you think there should have been a whistle there?: I mean, obviously you'd like there to be one. There wasn't. So, that's just the reality of it. There's nothing I can really do on that one in terms of they didn't blow it. And so, it was free. I think every time, it's going to be a little different. Sometimes those whistles come really quick, and sometimes they take a little bit longer. I think a credit to the group, too. It's tough with that. I thought Arty played an unbelievable game here for us throughout. And so, I do like the way the guys stuck with it there in terms of we had to find a way to score a goal. And we did. We couldn't find that second one there in overtime.
How did you feel like your new-look second and third lines looked today, especially with Malkin staying on the wing?: You make these adjustments, whether it's whether it's right or wrong, sometimes you're going through a little bit of a stretch (where) you're trying some different things. You go back, we’ll watch the tape. If you go throughout it, they were generating some chances, generating some O-zone time. My initial thought was, I thought it was a better look. But we’ll give it some time, we'll look at it again. We'll make decisions on it, if we're going to keep them or change them over the next day.
With Erik out of the lineup, I think there's a lot more responsibility on Kris right now. What are your thoughts on how he performed tonight?: It does fall on everybody. So, I think you're talking some situations, especially the power play. And he's been out there for 6-on-5, so that doesn't change much. I thought it was good. I thought the power play, we had some looks. We had some good looks. Coming off that last game, I think it was better than it was last game. And so, I think that's going to be probably one of the bigger ones in terms of new responsibilities. Tanger’s been out there in all these other situations on a pretty consistent basis.
