The importance of tonight’s game is not lost on anybody in that Penguins locker room and it is especially not lost on the two superstars who will be blamed if tonight doesn’t go as planned.
Pittsburgh is in the ever dangerous elimination zone. This zone is incredibly unkind. It doesn’t care if you outplayed the team and ran into a hot goalie. It doesn’t care that a bounce didn’t go your way at a crucial moment. It doesn’t care if your best players played great and were unrewarded on the scoresheet. You can do a lot of things right and still not get the result you want in hockey, but the team had to lose three times to get to this point and that is why we have best of seven series.
Mike Sullivan ended the speculation about his starting goaltender. He will be giving the start to Matt Murray. He said the following about his decision:
“Murray has a calming effect on the group in front of him. At this particular point in the season we don’t have the luxury of allowing players to play through things.”
I would argue that “the team doesn’t have the luxury of allowing players to play through things” logic should have applied to Game 5 as well, but that can’t be changed now. You can only try and make the best decisions moving forward.
Goaltending has been the difference between the Penguins playing for their lives tonight and perhaps already having locked up the series. Pittsburgh needs a quality start from their goaltender tonight. So far in this series Andrei Vasilevskiy has gone (.962, .927, .917, .921, .912) where Penguins starters (mostly Murray) have gone (.850, .905, .929, .867, .840) That just isn’t going to cut it even if the shot attempt volume is wildly in the Penguins favor and it is. Pittsburgh has 336 shot attempts to Tampa’s 239. The Penguins are getting “Vasilevskiy’d” at the moment.
The forward lines will be returning back to how they were before Sheary was removed from the lineup
It is what it is. Hopefully for Crosby and Malkin the coach will break away from the line rolling and they are given at least five minutes of even-strength together. I would hate to see the team down a goal in the third period still rolling those combinations like they were in Game 4.
Here is some additional information about Kris Letang’s terrible Game 5. This kind of information is very useful and does a lot more to explain a player’s performance. Unfortunately, we aren’t at the point where this information is widely available for every player because it takes the hard work of people manually tracking the information. One of the bonuses in having the team you cover in the final four is that there are more eyes on the game action and it leads to more detailed analysis like this.
The play of Kris Letang is going to go a long way in determining how Game 6 plays out.
If the season ends tonight there will certainly be some upset people in Pittsburgh. There will definitely be overreactions. Just remember where this team was on December 11th and where they are now. The Crosby and Malkin window is still wide open regardless of tonight’s events.
Thanks for reading!
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