Coming into Wednesday night’s intra-conference showdown with the Chicago Blackhawks, the Penguins had lost three straight games, including a heartbreaker in over time in Philadelphia the night before.
There are no must-win games in January in the National Hockey League, but the Penguins really wanted a win to right the ship and head of the for the all-star break on a high note.
Then, they spotted the Blackhawks a two-goal lead. It wasn’t because the Penguins played poorly; the Blackhawks played really, really well.
David Rundblad was the benefactor of the hard work of the Chicago first line of Brandon Saad, Marian Hossa and Jonathan Toews, who pinned the Penguins top unit of Sidney Crosby, Chris Kunitz and David Perron deep in the Penguins end for nearly a minute.
Rundblad’s shot from the point at 6:56 of the first period was the fourth attempt of the shift for the Blackhawks. Hossa and Toews earned the assists.
The Penguins carried the better of the play throughout, but when Perron took an ill-advised holding penalty at 1:40 of the second period, Hossa capitalized with a laser beam of a shot through a screen. Defenseman Brent Seabrook and Saad assisted on the play. Hossa and Saad both finished with two points.
The Penguins need to dig deep and get a goal to get themselves back into the game. Just 2:40 later after the Hossa, goal the Pens struck back, and it was from the least likely of sources.
Penguins center Andrew Ebbett, pressed into the lineup at the last minute due to a late scratch of Evgeni Malkin, won a battle in the right-wing corner and fed his teammate who was wide open between the circles. That teammate was Zach Sill. Sill was playing in his 32nd NHL game, and had exactly zero NHL goals on his resume. So naturally, he fired a beautiful shot that screamed past Chicago goaltender Corey Crawford and tucked into the top left corner of the net.
Sill was so fired up that he nearly decapitated a teammate with his celebration. The rest of the team got fired up, too, and the Penguins poured on the attack.
Steve Downie drew a penalty at 5:58 of the second when Crawford struck him with a high stick, but the Penguins found no success on the man-advantage. Their power play went 0-2 on the night on the heels of an 0-6 performance Tuesday night against the Flyers.
“(Tuesday) night, it was the deciding factor in the game, that we didn’t score on the power play,” said Penguins head coach Mike Johnston. “We need to score on the power play, but I thought tonight, we shot the puck more. I thought we had some really good scoring chances off the power play.”
The Penguins kept churning, and went on a 12-4 run of attempted shots following the Sill goal. Finally, another found its way in. Scott Harrington came down the left wing and took a nice shot that hit Crawford high. The rebound caromed into Mark Arcobello, who was crashing the net from the left wing. Then Marcel Goc picked it up and slid it to Downie, whose shot found it’s way through a tangle of legs and into the net to tie the game.
“All good teams have different types of lines,” said Johnston. “For us tonight, Goc-Arcobello-Downie and Sill-Adams-Ebbett, they really contributed. They were hard guys to play against, they got the puck down low, they scored, and for those guys to get some confidence now … if those guys can grind it out like they did and give us secondary scoring, that’s a big plus.”
The game went back-and-forth the rest of the way, with each team’s superstars getting several chances. Crosby hit the post at the end of the second period, and early in the third Perron deked Crawford completely out of the goal but shot it wide.
Marc-Andre Fleury made a ten-bell save on Toews in tight in the third period, and stopped a Brad Richards slapshot so heavy that it knocked his mask off. Hossa had another sterling chance in overtime when he outmuscled Harrington and pulled Fleury out of his cage, but fired it high.
Three periods and overtime were not enough to settle the score, and the game went to a shootout. Both Toews and Kane shot quickly and low to beat Fleury, while at the other end of the ice, Perron’s backhander rang the post and Crosby had his shot turned aside by Crawford.
The Penguins didn’t get the win they wanted, but to come from behind against one of the toughest squads in the West showed that they have the mental toughness to make a deep run in the second half.
“We haven’t played our best lately,” said Johnston, “So, in response, we needed it tonight, and we were short some guys, and if you look at the history of our team over the last month, when we’ve been short players and really short players, we seemed to be able to pick it up. Now we have to do that consistently.”
Photo credit: NHL
