Musings: Penguins Start Slow in Boston

It wasn’t the Penguins’ night on Tuesday in Boston, with the Bruins earning a 2-1 win at TD Garden.

Erik Karlsson had Pittsburgh’s lone goal, while Stuart Skinner stopped 26 of 28 shots.

He had to be ready from the get-go, as the Bruins came out buzzing. The Penguins goaltender produced two huge saves less than 30 seconds into play. He allowed his team to go the other way and find a goal from Karlsson, which stood after an unsuccessful coach’s challenge for goaltender interference.

Anthony Mantha was denied on a breakaway during the ensuing power play. After Boston killed it off, they tallied twice in a 50-second span to take a 2-1 lead exactly six minutes into the game. At that point, Dan Muse used his timeout to address the group, as they did not have their best in the first few minutes despite getting the goal.

“Obviously, they came out firing on all cylinders, and we couldn't really find our game, I don't think,” Karlsson said. “It took us until probably late in the second before we started feeling comfortable with ourselves. That's the way it's going to be sometimes. I still think that we battled through it. We came out of it just down one goal, and gave ourselves a chance the whole game. Both the goaltenders played tremendously and made the saves when they needed to.”

The Penguins ended up generating two more Grade-A chances from Egor Chinakhov on a breakaway and Noel Acciari shorthanded, but Olympic gold medalist Jeremy Swayman turned them aside. In the second period, Pittsburgh outshot Boston 15-11, but Swayman continued his strong play.

The Penguins had some extremely strong stretches of play in the third, but the Bruins did a good job of keeping them to the outside. That happened in the first matchup between these teams back in January, with Boston earning a 1-0 shutout victory.

While the Penguins couldn’t find a power-play goal on three opportunities, they also held Boston from converting any of their three chances despite missing one of their best penalty killers. Blake Lizotte was sidelined with a lower-body injury and is listed as day-to-day. Kevin Hayes entered the lineup in Lizotte’s absence.

“I thought the guys in front of me battled, especially just being down one. And the way we were able to get all of our PKs done, I mean, that's huge, especially in a tight game like that,” Skinner said. “So, it could have easily gone 3-1, and then you're out of the game. But just a really resilient group in here. We’re going to learn from our mistakes and be ready to go next game.”

Here’s what Muse had to say after the game.

The last 45, 50 minutes your team was fine. But the first 5, 10 minutes was the most sluggish we’ve seen them in a while. What did you see in that stretch that you didn’t like? Right off the faceoff, they get a scoring chance. They follow it up the next shift, then they get another chance. Then we scored the goal, you hoped that would be able to generate some kind of momentum our way. Shortly thereafter, they get the next two. So, the starts have to be better than that. There’s no question. Especially with a team like this, if you get behind early, they're just going to sit back and clog things up even more. That's what you saw for a lot of the game. It wasn’t good enough.

What was the message in the timeout? That we had to reset and get to work. You can’t change it now, but we have to play a much better brand of hockey. I thought we were disjointed, the support defensively – I think on both goals, just breakdowns. We were just not in the right spot, or we ended up doubling up on one. You’re not going to be perfect on every given night. Each team gets chances. I just didn’t like the types of chances that we were giving up and how many and how often they were happening early in the game. The building gets loud, all the momentum’s on their side. We’re just trying to pause things for a second, reboot and start to get back to playing the way we want to. I thought the shift afterwards was a little bit better, but I didn't feel like we sustained nearly enough between just what we were doing with the puck to try to enter the zone, opportunities there to get into the offensive zone and stay there. So, when I look at this, we have some things we definitely need to clean up from it.

Did you find any encouragement in the fact that you overcame that early pressure? Yeah, I mean, it got better. But we’re walking out of here without any points. At this time of year, you can’t walk away and say, that’s okay, it was a good effort. We didn’t start the way we wanted to, and we got to find ways to generate more. We had missed opportunities. Even when we did get in the offensive zone, we have to be able to stack plays and get to the net-front. I think we’re going to have more games like this down the stretch. Tight-checking games, it gets harder and harder from this point out. So, I think we got to take some things from this game and work on them and move on quick.

How have faceoffs been affecting your ability to generate momentum? Yeah, they’ve been down quite a bit. That’s obvious. You can’t use that as an excuse. We’re going to keep working with the centers and looking at things. Those guys are putting in work, I know that. We got to win more faceoffs by committee. We can ugly it up, get the wingers in there, get help, you know? And even off of that, if we do lose it, I thought we maybe had better pressure off the losses. We'll continue to work at it, continue to look at it, and I think it can improve. But it might have to be a little bit, just get ugly and win them by committee, more than just putting that on the center.