PITTSBURGH (AP) — The Pittsburgh Penguins’ resilience carried them to a surprise playoff berth.
Sidney Crosby and company will need to rely on it, maybe a lot of it, if they want their postseason appearance to be more than a token cameo.
It took the Philadelphia Flyers roughly 48 hours to take all the good vibes Pittsburgh generated during a resurgent season and make them a distant memory. Winning a pair of games on the road and shutting down one of the top offenses in the NHL will do that.
The Penguins were visibly frustrated on the ice and notably chastened off it following a 3-0 loss in Game 2 on Monday night that dropped them in a significant hole when the series shifts east to Philadelphia on Wednesday.
“I think we’ve been in some tough spots all year,” said Crosby, who was held without a point for the second straight game. “We’ve always responded really well to adversity. It seems like it’s brought out the best in all of us.”
Pittsburgh’s best will likely be required against the young Flyers, who have had no trouble carrying their searing finishing kick to the regular season into the playoffs. While Philadelphia didn’t put on a defensive clinic as it did for most of Game 1, when the Penguins were limited to just 17 shots, the Flyers largely limited Pittsburgh to firing away from the outside.
The Penguins generated 27 shots on goal and generated another 48 that either missed the net or were blocked. The ones that found their way to Dan Vladar were turned away. The ones that didn’t were mostly long blasts from the outside that missed the mark.
“Everything’s harder, it’s supposed to be harder, it’s the NHL playoffs,” Penguins coach Dan Muse said. “You’re going to have to do those little things that can give you an extra inch, finding a shot lane a little bit quicker, working to get to the net front a little bit faster.”
Pittsburgh’s power play, which was ranked a respectable seventh during the regular season, is now 0 for 7 through two games. The Penguins were actually outscored when they were up a man on Monday. Philadelphia’s Garnet Hathaway produced a short-handed goal late in the second to give the Flyers a 2-0 lead, though teammate Owen Tippett did the hard work, fending off two yellow-clad opponents to set Hathaway up.
“We don’t really get in sync yet,” Pittsburgh defenseman Erik Karlsson said. “You would think that we would dictate what we want to do out there, but they’re doing a good job and we’re not. That’s the bottom line.”
And time is running out. The Penguins have fallen behind 2-0 in a series 15 times and only rallied to win a third of them, the last in the 2009 Stanley Cup finals against Detroit.
Those Pittsburgh teams had featured a young Crosby and longtime running mate Evgeni Malkin still in the nascent stages of their careers. They’re both nearing 40 — Malkin will get there in July — and while they remain a threat every time they hop over the boards, the franchise icons and their teammates have been outskated and outplayed over the course of 120 minutes against a team that has 10 players making their playoff debut in this series.
“We’ve played 82 games,” Karlsson said. “We know how to play hockey in here. I think maybe we’re overthinking things a little too much. We’re not playing on our instincts.”
And as a result, the Penguins are playing from behind.
This isn’t the first time in the last seven months that Pittsburgh seems to have been on the verge of letting a promising season get away. The Penguins have navigated extended absences by both Crosby and Malkin and occasionally shaky play in net, among other things, on their way to a playoff spot that seemed like a longshot when training camp began.
The league’s third-highest-scoring team found a way to respond each time. On Tuesday, they’ll hop on a plane and make the short flight across the state hoping it’s not the final road trip of the year.
“I think that getting on the road and having a situation like this,” Crosby said, “hopefully brings out the best in us again.”
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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
