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Penguins get last laugh as Crosby, McDavid each put on a show: Yohe's 10 observations

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PITTSBURGH — The Penguins were once the team that could deliver offense in bursts that would knock out a team before it had even begun. These days, the Edmonton Oilers are the team boasting that kind of dynamic attack.

For a night, the Penguins turned back the clock by striking early and protecting a big lead with a pretty impressive combination of efficiency and tenacity in their feel-good win of the season, a 5-3 victory over Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and the Oilers.

The superstars on both sides put on a show. Ultimately for the Penguins, their overall team game and the goaltending performance of Alex Nedeljkovic were the difference.

“I just thought we were really good as a unit of five tonight,” Kris Letang said. “It was a perfect recipe. You play really good offensive team, you play really well defensively. You still put five goals on the board. That’s just a game you can build on.”

Sidney Crosby produced a goal and two assists while McDavid responded with three helpers of his own. Draisaitl scored two goals, giving him 31 on the season.

Evgeni Malkin missed his second straight game with an upper-body injury.

Crosby, Bryan Rust, Rickard Rakell, Kevin Hayes and Drew O’Connor scored for the Penguins. Nedeljkovic, in one of his stronger performances of the season, stopped 40 of 43 shots against the high-powered Oilers.

The Penguins, who have frequently started slowly this season, took a 3-0 lead before the first half was 10 minutes old on goals from Rakell, Rust and Hayes. A Draisaitl goal to give the Oilers life received an immediate response from O’Connor, giving the Penguins a 4-1 lead at the conclusion of the first period.

For the remainder of the evening, the Penguins remain poised and rarely gave the Oilers’ dangerous transition attack an opportunity to start an odd-man rush.

The victory keeps the Penguins tied with the Columbus Blue Jackets for the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

Up next is a very important weekend back-to-back at home against Ottawa on Saturday and Tampa Bay on Sunday.

“This is big for us,” Rust said. “It gives a lot of confidence that if we play the way we can beat any team.”

Ten postgame observations 

• When the Penguins and Oilers are sharing an ice surface, starting with Crosby and McDavid seems logical. They didn’t disappoint.

Crosby played one of his finer two-way games of the season. The Oilers opted to play McDavid and Draisaitl together almost exclusively, and it was Crosby’s line tasked with containing them while producing offense of their own.

Consider it done. Crosby joked after the game about feeling the fatigue of keeping up with McDavid and Draisaitl, but make no mistake, he loves the challenge. Crosby was in strong form all night and gave the Penguins a 5-1 lead with a power-play goal courtesy of a beautiful feed from Michael Bunting.

Crosby’s linemates weren’t so bad either. I don’t have enough words left to describe the level of play we are seeing from Rust and Rakell. This is fast becoming one of the best lines of Crosby’s career.

• One thing I’ve come to admire about McDavid is how hard he plays every night. Yes, he’s probably in a class with only Mario Lemieux and Bobby Orr when it comes to pure physical gifts in hockey history. He could be forgiven if he chose to take the occasional night off. But he never does.

Moreover, we have learned he particularly enjoys playing against the Penguins. McDavid had a poster of Crosby on his bedroom wall when he was a child. It’s very clear he gets up for these encounters.

The Penguins were smart most of the game, opting to dump the puck on many occasions, thus not inviting the Oilers on odd-man rushes. You have to play that way against McDavid and the Penguins did.

McDavid was at his super-charged best most of the evening, showcasing the blazing speed that is his trademark. He was in top form and yet I thought the Penguins played him about as well as they possibly could have. They are not a great defensive team and he’s a great offensive player, who happened to be playing on the same line as another great offensive player. The Penguins held down the fort as well as you could have expected.

• The Penguins’ blue line is becoming a story. In a good way.

That unit was a profound disaster in the season’s first six weeks, but not now. The duo of Erik Karlsson and Matt Grzelcyk has operated at a high level for a couple of weeks now. Karlsson is the catalyst, of course, and he was excellent once again in this game.

The Letang-Marcus Pettersson pairing enjoyed a very strong evening. They were both a plus-3 on the evening and it may have been Pettersson’s finest game of the season. Playing against a team that is believed to be interested in his services, Pettersson, an unrestricted free agent this summer, played a stifling game. In the third period, with Bunting in the penalty box and the Oilers down two, the Penguins produced their best penalty kill of the season and Pettersson’s fingerprints were all over it.

Two nights earlier, he struggled on the penalty kill against the Blue Jackets. Against the great Oilers, he rose up to the occasion. He finished with five blocked shots and two assists.

If these two pairings keep playing at this level, the Penguins might be onto something. The third pairing of Owen Pickering and P-O Joseph, incidentally, was perfectly solid.

• Nedeljkovic was sharp all evening. I asked Sullivan after the game if Nedeljkovic was being considered for a greater percentage of playing time, especially given how well he played on this night. Sullivan said yes.

Then he added this.

“The thing we love about Ned is that he’s consistent,” Sullivan said. “He competes hard. He battles hard. You know what you’re going to get from him, night in and night out.”

When Sullivan said this, he was complimenting Nedeljkovic, of course. Yet it was difficult to avoid thinking about Tristan Jarry. Those are words Sullivan never directs toward his other netminder.

Don’t be surprised if Nedeljkovic starts receiving more starts, maybe even the majority. Just a hunch.

• Pardon the simplicity of this comment, but the Penguins just played really, really hard. They are not a better team than the Oilers, but they earned this win. They very much out-worked Edmonton.

They blocked 24 shots. There was a tenacity in everything they did. It wasn’t a work of art, but the Penguins played a smart and tough game.

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Kris Letang and Marcus Pettersson fend off Connor McDavid behind the Penguins net. (Justin Berl / Getty Images)

• Rust was called for interfering with McDavid in the second period. At the time, I agreed with the call but thought McDavid went down a little early.

As it turns out, he did. McDavid explained to Rust later in the game that he went down so easily because in a recent game, he was called for a penalty while charging through a player in a similar situation. He didn’t want to get penalized again and went into a defensive posture, essentially.

I have to say, I appreciate McDavid telling Rust this. There is something enduring about hockey players communicating so nicely.

• The Penguins remained furious about the call on Bunting in the third period. Bunting and Nurse got into a dispute and only Bunting was given a penalty. It was the classic NHL call where the team losing gets the power play. I just talked about this following the Columbus game. If it’s a tie game, no penalty is called.

Many in the Penguins’ organization were still livid about that call following the game.

That said, it gave the Penguins an opportunity for their best penalty kill of the season. So all’s well that ends well.

• I loved how the Penguins played in the third period. There was a feeling of dread inside PPG Paints Arena when Edmonton’s deficit shifted from 5-1 to 5-3 late in the second period.

Protecting leads isn’t the Penguins’ thing. Yet that third period was one of their most important of the season. They were in control. I think it was a huge step in the right direction.

• The Penguins have recorded at least one point in 15 of their past 20 games. I can’t say they’re playing great hockey, but they’re methodically getting better and better. More than anything, they’re playing a much smarter brand of hockey than earlier in the season.

• The Oilers had won seven straight games against the Penguins, almost all of them in utterly dominant fashion. I didn’t expect this result. I don’t believe many people did.

Since Sullivan and his staff were getting torched in October by the fan base, I’d suggest they deserve some credit now for what we’re seeing. The staff clearly never “lost the room.”

This team is playing hard and frankly, is starting to play like a team. What a turnaround.

(Top photo of Sidney Crosby and Evan Bouchard: Justin Berl / Getty Images)



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