Penguins/Hurricanes Recap: Skating on tilted ice. Pens no match for Carolina

Carolina tilts the ice on Pittsburgh all night long and pulls away for a 4-1 win

Pregame

The Penguins decide to make no lineup changes from Wednesday night’s win over Buffalo for tonight’s game.

Meanwhile, the visiting Hurricanes are bringing the following crew to the party.

First period

Slow start for the Penguins, though it has to be acknowledged it’s tough to start well against a quality opponent. Carolina gets the first five shots in the game, including one from right in front after Marcus Pettersson turned the puck over, and another when William Carrier slipped behind Jack St. Ivany. Joel Blomqvist handled both with ease.

The Pens barely got into the offensive zone when Carolina’s Sean Walker took a neutral zone penalty. Pittsburgh would barely get in the OZ with the Canes having four players either after a fruitless power play.

Pittsburgh struggled to hold the puck, a tough Hurricanes team make every inch like fighting through quicksand. Finally, out of no where, Drew O’Connor strikes 12:20 into the game on just the Pens’ second shot on goal. It’s a perfect top corner wrist shot from distance that foils Frederik Andersen. 1-0 Pens.

The Hurricanes tie it up before the goal announcement can finish. Pettersson goes into the corner and the front of the net is open for Jackson Blake to take a pass and fire it home. 1-1.

It’s always a grind against Carolina and the game ambles onto intermission. Shots are 10-3 CAR through 20, shot attempts are 25-13. Most importantly, score is tied at 1.

Second period

Given the note below, it’s perhaps no surprise to see O’Connor get promoted to the Malkin-Rakell line to start the second period.

Pettersson takes Pittsburgh’s first minor penalty of the night. The Canes snap it around and Martin Necas snaps a shot with plenty of power past Blomqvist’s glove. 2-1.

The Pens load up with Malkin-Crosby-Rust as the line coming out of the PK goal. Not much of it comes from it.

The relentless Carolina pressure continues, Kris Letang can’t knock away a centering pass and has to slash a Hurricane in alone. Blomqvist stops the puck but the Canes go to their second power play of the game. The PK holds strong and Carrier trips Erik Karlsson to put the Pens back to a power play of their own.

Carolina hits the post while shorthanded, so yeah, not great for the home team. Bryan Rust does get a look from in front for at least a chance but not much going on the power play, like all the other modes of play so far.

A bit of bad luck when Michael Bunting’s stick comes up when he’s being hit and clips Andrei Svechnikov on the nose. There’s blood so it’s a four-minute double minor. Carolina converts on the first part, Shayne Gotisbehere drops into a long-range slapper that Acciari can’t block and Blomqvist loses through the traffic. 3-1 game.

Pittsburgh kills the second power play.

Shots go to Carolina 14-6 in the second and 24-9 overall. They score two PPG’s in the second period to jump out to a 3-1 lead.

Third period

Carolina takes an offensive zone penalty (they’re not playing in many other zones tonight, folks!) and the Pens get an early period opportunity. No dice.

Cody Glass almost scores at even strength but the puck doesn’t cooperate trickling just wide after squeaking through Andersen’s pads.

Another Crosby-Malkin-Rust line, but as Mike Rupp pointed out on the TV broadcast, very weird and rare to see Crosby play on the wing. That line doesn’t pay off, Jack Roslovic fires a hard shot off the top of Blomqvist’s shoulder and into the net. 4-1 game with 9:00 left.

Walker airmails a puck so the Pens get another crack at the power play.

Crosby gets tripped with an even minute left so one more chance for the Pittsburgh power play to not score and the game comes to an end.

Some thoughts

• The coaching cat-and-mouse game between Mike Sullivan and Rod Brind’Amour is always fun to observe. Over the years, Brind’Amour has proven to love getting Jordan Staal and the best Carolina checking line on Evgeni Malkin, then having the Sebastian Aho line go heads up against Sidney Crosby. Sullivan obliged by having Malkin start the game, after visiting Carolina had to make the first move and went with Staal. Sometimes Sullivan has tried to steer around that to a degree, but he certainly was ready for it tonight.
• When’s the right time to start getting concerned about Marcus Pettersson? He’s having some problems that have nothing to do with an aggressive partner; tripping all over the place, making bad reads and low percentage passes, whiffing on pucks, etc. It’s not the time to panic but it’s odd to see the steady-as-the-day-is-long Pettersson start this season looking not like his typical self. No one was particularly sharp in this game but overall there’s been a concerning trend for Pettersson this season.
• Through 11 minutes on the official score sheet on nhl.com Pittsburgh had 0 SOG and only 2 shot attempts (misses by Noel Acciari and Erik Karlsson). Carolina as a possession-based team had the puck practically all game to start and the Pens were not able to make much headway against them. That set a tone that didn’t change for the rest of the game.
• The Pens had only allowed two total goals in the first five games while shorthanded and that doubled up quickly in the second period tonight. Very impressive looking power play for Carolina, and they played hard enough to force Pittsburgh to penalize themselves trying to slow the Canes.
• The other side of the special teams didn’t work out well either, with the modest two-game power play goal streak coming to an end. And it wasn’t pretty or even close in this one.
• Michael Bunting got bumped off the Malkin line (and all the way down to the fourth line by the end of the night) and also taken off the second power play during the game. Bunting has no goals and only one assist this season. Not the greatest of starts, it’ll be interesting to see if he’s in the doghouse and moves down the lineup for a bit or gets a chance to play through it. The team needs more out of him somehow, but the coach is using the main tool he has (ice time) to show what he thinks about Bunting’s play.
• It was a 3-1 lead after two, if they were playing the old pickup game where posts count, add four more for Carolina. Two more shots Blomqvist got pretty lucky that they hit the shaft of his goal stick and stayed out. This one was so much closer to being a full-on rout than a competitive game.
• As it was, the Hurricanes will have to settle for almost complete control of this game and handle their business with what looked like ease. So far this season Pittsburgh has played three teams that made the playoffs last season and are 0-3 and not looking all that worthy. They’re 3-0 against the non-playoff teams from last year. There’s a very real and clear level that this team bumps up against and is having difficulty getting through so far.
• Might be nothing, might be something but Sidney Crosby only took 10 of the 57 faceoffs tonight. The previous two games he took 28/57 vs MTL and 31/67 against BUF. Malkin took the final faceoff on the power play, which never happens (barring Crosby getting waived out). Sid still won 6/10 tonight, it could be strategic that they want to experiment with him away from the drop, but he’s also still the active best faceoff taker in the league so that’s strange his usage was so limited tonight, to say the least. Crosby still played over 20 minutes tonight, didn’t miss any chunks of time or appear to be outwardly injured but dunno. Just a very unusual shift in strategy for yet to be known reasons.

Maybe a letdown game should have been expected following the thrilling comeback OT win on Wednesday night. The Pens didn’t look like they had a lot in the tank. Then again, this is what a good Carolina team does to others when they’re on their game. Which they clearly were. The Pens hit the road for the next four games, starting off in Winnipeg on Sunday afternoon.