Tim Benz: Penguins sound like they are running out of answers
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After practice on Tuesday, Penguins coach Mike Sullivan talked about “rethinking what winning looks like in Pittsburgh.”
I’m going to guess whatever he was thinking about isn’t what the Penguins showed Wednesday night against the Florida Panthers, and that’s not what it was supposed to look like.
Especially in the second period.
The Penguins gave up four goals in roughly nine minutes after a scoreless first and ended up losing the game 5-2. It’s the third straight defeat for the Penguins and their sixth in eight tries. Five of those six losses have come in regulation. So the Penguins aren’t even getting loser points.
That’s not good for a team that is struggling to climb the Eastern Conference standings from 12th place into the eighth and final playoff spot. That gap currently stands at seven points, with four teams between the Pens and the East’s second wild-card spot.
And Sullivan was left without answers as to what went wrong in the Penguins’ latest failed attempt to get back on track.
“This one’s a tough one for me to assess coming off the bench. Usually I’ve got a pretty good feel. It wasn’t like we were under siege or anything. We just gave up some untimely goals,” Sullivan said.
What might be most alarming for Sullivan and the Penguins is that they are running out of different things to try to fix matters.
At least with the team as currently constructed.
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“We’ve made lots of changes in lots of different areas of our game to try to gain some traction in different aspects,” Sullivan insisted. “I think we have a certain belief or philosophy and how we should play in order to set this group up for success. A lot of our main concepts revolve around that. Having said that, we make all kinds of tweaks and adjustments along the way with every aspect of our game — breakouts, or neutral-zone play, or offensive-zone play, or power-play stuff. We’ve tweaked personnel. We move lines around. There’s lots of changes that are going on to try to continue to evolve.”
What Sullivan didn’t talk about there was the prospect of a big trade. But that’s something that is going to be difficult for general manager Kyle Dubas to conjure, given the amount of no-movement clauses on this roster, salary-cap constraints, and lack of tradable assets to acquire talent that can help this year.
If anything, at this point, the Penguins may be in sell mode. That means potentially dealing free-agent-to-be Jake Guentzel.
Oh, by the way, to make matters worse, Guentzel left Wednesday night’s game with an upper-body injury and missed a big chunk of the third period.
“I thought the power play had some opportunities to get us going early in the game. We didn’t execute,” Sullivan added. “I don’t think we handled their pressure very well. They’re a real aggressive kill. And I think we could have done a better job there.”
Oh yeah. The power play. The (insert descriptive expletive here) power play.
The man-up was 0 for 4 versus Florida. It has scored just once in its last 13 tries over the last three games and is four for its last 40. At 13.6% for the season, the Penguins are 30th in the league in that category.
On Wednesday, Sullivan also spoke about the need to avoid regularly playing a chance-for-chance kind of game. In the past — as in the Stanley Cup years of 2016 and 2017 — the Penguins could’ve thrived in that type of environment. But such an approach seems likely to do more harm than good to this year’s club.
So, by extension, if the Penguins aren’t looking to create as many chances on the rush to generate offense, they better cash in on the chances they get on the power play.
Clearly, that hasn’t happened.
“We’re working on it pretty much every day,” forward Rickard Rakell said after the loss. “We’re feeling better about it. But we have to execute and use the P.K. — whatever they do to kill — we’ve got to use that against them in a better way.”
To be fair, Rakell did have a power-play goal taken off the board in the second period. However, the Penguins did a lousy job responding to that adversity, and Florida capitalized, building a four-goal lead before Bryan Rust finally got Pittsburgh on the board at the 15:24 mark of the second.
That said, fret not, Pens fans. Things should turn around Thursday night. The Penguins take on Chicago, the worst team in hockey, with just 31 points.
And when have the Penguins ever lost to a bad Chicago team when they have really been in need of victory to keep their season alive?