The Lightning showed why they are one of the best teams in the league on Thursday at Amalie Arena, beating Pittsburgh 6-3.
"This is a different time of the year. This was a good eye opener for us,” Erik Karlsson said. “The really good teams are really starting to shape up. Tampa is one of them."
Tampa Bay clinched a playoff spot, while the Penguins’ positioning remained the same. They did not move from second place in the Metropolitan Division (92 points), with the idle Islanders in third (89 points). Detroit and Ottawa both won, giving each 88 points and the top-two Wild Card spots.
“I just thought overall, they were better tonight,” Sidney Crosby said. “That’s hockey sometimes. We got to make sure we respond this weekend (in back-to-back home games against Florida).”
The Penguins didn’t have a good start, with the Lightning putting them back on their heels early. Tampa Bay got rewarded with a goal just over five minutes in.
But the Penguins did respond less than two minutes after that, with Sam Girard dancing into the offensive zone and finding Rickard Rakell at the side of the net. He kicked it up to his stick and quickly snuck it in past Andrei Vasilevskiy.
That continued Rakell’s red-hot tear, as he is now on a six-game point streak, where he has picked up seven goals and two assists. The forward also has points in 14 of his last 15 outings, picking up 10 goals and nine assists over that span.
Girard helped set up Pittsburgh’s next goal to give him two assists on the night, in his best game as a Penguin to date. It’s taken some time for the 2022 Stanley Cup Champion with Colorado to get comfortable, understandably so. Girard was in his ninth season with the Avalanche before getting acquired by the Penguins, with the teams playing different styles.
But now that Girard has gotten more used to his new surroundings, he’s been able to display the strengths of his game, particularly the offensive instincts.
“I thought he had a good night,” Head Coach Dan Muse said. “I thought he was involved at both ends of the ice. He was skating with pucks, navigating through the neutral zone. I thought he did a good job there in the D zone as well.”
The second tally, scored by another in-season addition, Egor Chinakhov, gave Pittsburgh a 2-1 lead going into the first intermission. But despite the score, the Penguins didn’t feel great about where they stood.
"They outworked us and outsmarted us right from the start. We were up 2-1 in the first but they were the better team,” Karlsson said. “In the second, I don't know if we even played the game or if they were just that much better than us."
Just 11 seconds in, the Penguins gave up a shorthanded goal. They have surrendered 12 this season, which ranks near the bottom of the league.
“We can’t give those up,” Crosby said. “So, got to look at it and find ways to keep it out of our net on the power play.”
The Lightning found two more goals late in the frame to take a 4-2 lead into the second intermission.
On the first one, the Penguins turned the puck over at the blue line, and the Lightning went the other way. Stuart Skinner made the initial save on Jake Guentzel, but he recovered the puck behind the net, and found Brayden Point in front of the net. He had enough time and space to bury a shot.
The second one came with 54.7 seconds left, with Zemgus Girgensons making a nice play to tuck the puck around Skinner.
“They're a good team, so it's going to be tight checking. I think you have to expect that. It’s just a game of mistakes, and you can't make mistakes that we made against a team that's pretty opportunistic,” Crosby said. “If it's tight, it's tight, but we got to make sure that defensively, we're stronger.”
While Muse said they’ve seen better performances as of late from Skinner, making his fourth start in the last five games, he always battles.
“They got some really good players, so you can’t give them second and third opportunities,” Muse said.
The Penguins didn’t generate much in the third. Chinakhov found the lone goal with 1.5 seconds left to hit 20 goals in a season for the first time in his career.
“They’re on top of you, and they do a really good job of it,” Muse said. “They make it difficult. It’s not a surprise, because we’ve seen it before, and it’s pretty clear what their plan is. But we didn’t do the things we needed to do to get out of it and be able to spend more time in the offensive zone.
“We got to turn the page quick. There's not going to be any easy games. Every day is going to have a new challenge, and none of them are going to be easy this time of year. And so, based on this game, there's some lessons we absolutely have to take away and move forward with. They made it difficult, and I think we got away from things that have worked at times.”
