Penguins shelve outrage over Evgeni Malkin suspension
The way Kris Letang sees it, “screaming in the media” wouldn’t put Evgeni Malkin back in the Pittsburgh Penguins lineup against the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday night.
So he didn’t.
And neither did any of his teammates.
Reaction was largely muted to the news that Malkin would have to serve a one-game suspension for swinging his stick at the head of Philadelphia Flyers forward Michael Raffl on Monday night.
“I didn’t really have a reaction,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “The league makes the decisions and it doesn’t really matter what I think or you think or the rest of us think. The league makes their decisions and we’re going to live by it.”
In a perfect world, captain Sidney Crosby said, Malkin would have retaliated to a gloved punch he took in the back of the head from Raffl in a different way, but he knows that’s not always possible.
“It’s an emotional game,” Crosby said. “You’re going to do stuff sometimes. Ideally you wouldn’t do anything but skate away, but I’m sure there are a lot of guys, myself included, that have said that a number of times and it doesn’t always work out that way.”
Jonathan Bombulie is the TribLive assistant sports editor. A Greensburg native, he was a hockey reporter for two decades, covering the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins for 17 seasons before joining the Trib in 2015 and covering the Penguins for four seasons, including Stanley Cup championships in 2016-17. He can be reached at jbombulie@triblive.com.
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