Sully Says: We Just Got Outplayed

After defeating the Flyers on Friday in Philadelphia, the Penguins traveled back to Pittsburgh to face off against Toronto on Saturday in Pittsburgh. The Leafs earned a 4-1 victory, which snapped a five-game winning streak for the Penguins.

Toronto got off to a hot start, opening the scoring just 40 seconds in after the Penguins got caught on a line change following the first shift. They took that 1-0 lead into the first intermission.
The Maple Leafs struck again 10 minutes into the second period, and a minute later, William Nylander scored to make it 3-0 for Toronto.
Rickard Rakell had an opportunity in the second period to get on the board and even the score when a puck trickled through Leafs goalie Erik Kallgren and was sitting in the crease. The official explanation was that the puck was deemed dead as there was not continuous motion of the shot, and the whistle was blown to kill the play - no goal.
"I heard the whistle before I shot the puck in, but I saw it was loose the whole time," Rakell said. "The referee told me if the puck was still in motion, the goal would have counted. But it stopped, so they had to call it off."
That would have been a huge momentum changer for the Penguins, but instead, the Leafs got two goals 55 seconds apart to build a 3-0 lead after 40 minutes.
Rakell officially got on the board at the 11:38 mark of the third period, assisted by Jake Guentzel and Sidney Crosby. But the Leafs quickly answered back with a goal of their own from Auston Matthews, which brought the score to 4-1.
"I wish I could have had that one and kept it a two-goal game," said Penguins netminder Casey DeSmith, who made 37 saves. "Pull the goalie, you just never know. Three goals, obviously that's tough."
Head coach Mike Sullivan shared his thoughts after the game.
On what he thought of the disallowed goal: "Obviously, the puck is loose, the referees didn't see it. You'd hope they'd see it and not blow the whistle, but that's their call. If they don't see it, they got to blow the whistle. That's how it was."
On the team's struggles in the second half of back-to-back games: "I don't know the answer. I think what I would say to you is that the sample size is pretty small, so it might be difficult to draw any conclusions from that. I don't have a valid answer. But we need to be better."
On Toronto's first goal: "It's a bad line change, and we need more awareness."
On the level of frustration that Sidney Crosby showed on the bench early in the game: "I don't know the answer to that. Obviously, you don't want to give up a goal in the first 40 seconds of the game. I'm sure that probably had a little something to do with it, but I don't know the answer."
On why the Penguins were not able to dictate this game: "We got outplayed. We just got outplayed. I thought Toronto played hard, you got to give Toronto credit. They played hard, they defended hard. They made us work for our offense. And I thought we gave them some easy looks. We've got to do a better job pushing back, we need to defend harder. I just think we got outplayed."
On how he would assess Casey DeSmith's performance: "It's a tough game to assess because he had some real quality saves that he had to make. And so, I thought he gave us a chance. For the most part, the game was within striking distance. Knowing that we weren't at our best, Casey gave us a chance."