The Boston Bruins defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins in overtime on Monday night after an electric finish to the 3rd period. Captain Sidney Crosby tied the game up on the doorstep with 0.3 seconds left in the game. Crosby had earlier tipped in the Bruins third goal past Marc Andre Fleury and was able to get the goal back in dramatic fashion.
The jubilation was short lived as the Bruins were able to cash in during the overtime frame just 34 seconds in.
Here are the game highlights:
Here is the possession chart:
The Penguins controlled a good share of the gameplay but after the Penguins tied the game up the Bruins surged and were rewarded with their 3rd goal. Play evened out and then the Bruins ended the game in OT in quick fashion.
James Neal is the real deal. The man has vapor trails on his shots. James Neal has scored 4 goals in the past two games and the chemistry between him and Evgeni Malkin is heating up. Neal has 5 goals and 9 points in the Penguins last 4 games.
Malkin is now tied for 3rd overall in the NHL point race with 27 points. He trails teammate Sidney Crosby by 4.
Malkin might not be scoring goals but does it really matter if he is the genesis for so many of his teammates’ goals?
The Penguins may have played well for large stretches of the hockey game but it doesn’t matter when players make very alarming isolated mistakes. On 3 of the 4 Bruins goals the Penguins players made extremely avoidable and careless mistakes.
Brooks Orpik did not play his best game on Monday night. The first two Bruins goals were direct results of an Orpik mistake. The 1st Bruins goal was the result of a physical mistake at the offensive blue line. Orpik whiffed on a shot which allowed the Bruins to exit the zone on a 3 on 2. Orpik then compounded his physical error by making an egregious mental error at the defensive blue line. Orpik pinched to the strong side even though his partner Martin was already there. The pinch allowed for a breakaway which Louis Eriksson deposited into the net past Fleury.
Here is the moment before Orpik decides to aggressively pursue the puck carrier:
Orpik had the option of going to where the green arrow was. It would have been at worst a 3 on 2 with potential help coming from the forward unit; instead he takes the red arrow route:
This was obviously not a wise choice and you can see just how much ice he gave away by making the aggressive decision that he did. Poor risk management by Orpik.
Orpik also made a grave mistake on the Penguins penalty kill which led to the Bruins second goal.
Here is the start of the sequence:
The Penguins are in decent shape, the puck is in a non threatening area and there is no immediate dangerous pass available for the Bruins. The puck will now be moved down towards the goal line.
Here is where the trouble begins. Orpik shoots out right away to the puck carrier even though he is not in a dangerous area on the ice. By committing to the puck carrier he has left a wide open void in front of the net. Orpik should have stayed at the near post and left the Bruins skater to roam around on the perimeter.
At the same time Craig Adams is out to lunch on his penalty killing responsibility. Adams added to Orpik’s mistake by not dropping down when the puck was on the weak side. His responsibility is to provide assistance so that a clean back door pass is not available. Instead he is left covering nobody.
As you can see Orpik leaving the near post to fruitlessly pursue the non threatening puck carrier provided the open ice necessary to attempt a pass across. Craig Adams’ poor coverage on the back end was the icing on the cake for the easy tap in goal for the Bruins.
And that is how you find yourself down 2-0 in an NHL hockey game.
In the overtime session it was the hero of regulation who made the biggest error. Sidney Crosby got careless with his defensive zone responsibilities and when you are playing 4 on 4 hockey, the consequences can be fatal.
At the beginning of the sequence we can see that the Penguins are in decent shape. The problem starts when Crosby does not stop and start and instead takes a curl away from Krug.
Crosby’s curl was all it took for Krug to make his charge towards the wide open real estate. As you can see the passing lane was so big that Steve Macinytre could have gone tape to tape in that situation.
In this last slide it shows the moment right before the goal. The Penguins are actually in decent enough shape for having such a break down.
The two green highlighted areas represent battles in which the Penguins players are clearly winning. There is no threat of a pass on the play. The red line is where I think Fleury should have been out challenging the shot. Because of the lack of a passing threat Fleury needs to be more aggressive and get his butt outside of the blue paint. If Fleury aggressively challenges Krug in that situation he would not have had to make a save, the puck would have just hit him. Make no doubt about it though, that was a hell of a shot by Krug.
The nice thing about these errors is that they are extremely fixable. The bad thing is that NHL players shouldn't be making them.
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The Penguins released some information on the injury front last night. The news on Beau Bennett is not good, not good at all.
Beau Bennett will apparently be out 8-10 weeks after having surgery on his left wrist area. Bennett had a significant wrist injury in college but it was his right wrist. Losing Bennett is a tough pill to swallow for the Penguins given that they do not have a plethora of forwards with puck skills outside of their top 6 players. The Penguins currently have one of the most underwhelming bottom 6 forward groupings in the league.
In a year where the salary cap is down, injuries are going to pack a bigger punch than usual.
Some good news on the injury front is that Rob Scuderi will be starting to skate again shortly and his return is still pegged for the end of December. His presence in the lineup won’t come a moment too soon.
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Shocking news north of the border as the new NHL TV agreement in Canada will NOT include TSN. Rogers and CBC will be the two locations moving forward. The deal is for 12 years and a whopping 5.2B, yes that is a ‘B’. The revenue will be shared amongst all 30 teams and you can now understand why the owners were fighting so hard for 50% of the HRR during the previous lockout.
Here is my piece about the new TV deal that can be found over at the Hockey Hurts website .
How will this specifically impact the Penguins moving forward? The salary cap ceiling is most certainly going to continue to climb which will allow Shero to provide more quality depth to the roster.
That is all for now.
Thanks for reading!