After an entertaining game against the Capitals the Penguins played a dull one against the New Jersey Devils. The boredom on this occasion will have to be owned by the Penguins instead of the Devils in a bit of a role reversal. Pittsburgh didn't come to play and it showed.
Travis Zajac had two goals and an assist and led the way for the Devils dismantling of the Penguins. Zajac has played in 34 games this year and has seven goals and three assists on the year. So 30% of his offensive output in 2017-18 happened last night.
The intrigue heading into last night's game on the Penguins side of things was Zach Aston-Reese's NHL debut. All in all it was an uneventful evening where he played around five minutes being shuffled from the fourth line to getting some sniffs with Crosby and Malkin. If the reason for calling up Aston-Reese was to fill the Hornqvist void then they will need to change up his usage. There really isn't anything to take away from his debut with such limited minutes with no consistency in deployment. In a lot of ways his debut was like the game, very forgettable.
Evgeni Malkin scored again in the losing cause. It was a play that he started at his own goal line and finished at the other team's goal line.
That is a lot of ground to cover and he just kinda makes it look easy. It's like that Mario Lemieux Canada Cup goal where Lemieux tips the puck up to Gretzky and then he just kinda shows up out of nowhere to finish the play off. The other Penguins in the play did a great job with their choices to buy Malkin some time to get up the ice. Phil Kessel is incredibly good at driving defenders back and pulling up to find trailers. Ian Cole showed some nice vision on the play and Malkin did the rest. Nice goal on a drab evening.
Casey DeSmith played well all things considered, but he will be heading back to WB/S. Not because of how he's played, but the team is returning to having Tristan Jarry being the backup. In his three games in the AHL Jarry put up a .941 save percentage.
In other WB/S news Daniel Sprong scored his 20th goal of the season. He has 35 points in 34 games. He's in that nice point per game wheelhouse. It's a good thing for a team with a lot of well paid veterans to get this kind of production from ELC players. The trick is to actually play them at the NHL level while their value is good. You don't want to do what the Capitals did with Dmitry Orlov which is underplay him and then when you finally decide to commit ice time you have to pony up the big money.
Next game for the Penguins will be against Marc-Andre Fleury and the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday.
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