Penguins have horrible weekend, lose to CBJ and Flyers
Not even the return of Evgeni Malkin against the Flyers on Sunday could help the Penguins break their rut. Not even a dominant performance by Sidney Crosby against the Jackets could get the Penguins two much needed points. The Penguins have relied too much on their star players in the past and it is catching up with them based on a bare fact. The depth isn't there.
The nightmare weekend started on the Saturday against the Columbus Blue Jackets who were riding an eight game winning streak and looking to extend it to a franchise record nine. The Penguins had a good first period and scored a nice tic-tac-toe goal from Crosby just after the mid-way point. After a Brandon Sutter goal in the second it all went pear shaped. The Blue Jackets scored four unanswered in 13:04 to give them a 4-2 lead. The Penguins had a late chance after Ben Lovejoy scored his first goal since returning to the Penguins but the chance of even a point were snuffed out by Foligno scoring his hat-trick goal on an empty netter.
The Penguins didn't have much time to dwell on what happened with an early afternoon game against the Flyers today. We know how well both afternoon games and ones against the Flyers go, so what was expected happened. The Penguins were dominating the first period and were leading 22-3 in shots. Until Winnik took a needless penalty which the Flyers promptly scored from. After that the usual story took place. The Penguins were unable to keep the same level of intensity up and the Flyers took their chances. For the second game in a week Brayden Schenn had a multi-point game.
After the game Sutter said something to the effect of; "If we play like we did tonight we'll be fine". Those kinds of comments are worrying. If he is thinking that then how many other players in that dressing room are along the same trail of thought? How can they be happy with how they played, especially when they had nearly 2.5 times the number of shots the Flyers had. I mean, that could be what he is alluding to, but that is a very big straw to grasp. You can have as many shots as you want but if you don't take them then they're meaningless.
The Senators are currently three points behind and play the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight with a chance of cutting the lead down to one point ahead of their next game on Tuesday. Against Pittsburgh. Oh boy. If we lose that and fail to make the play-offs big changes will be needed.
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