The Pittsburgh Penguins ended their preseason on a high note, earning their fifth straight win after defeating the Buffalo Sabres 5-4 in overtime. Sidney Crosby scored late in the third period to tie the game and then got the game-winner just nine seconds into the extra frame.<\/p>\n
Even without the help of forward Bryan Rust, who is out with a lower-body injury, Pittsburgh\u2019s power play was able to score two goals that brought them back into the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could easily have gotten frustrated not getting in on the first few breakouts, but I think we just stuck with it and tried to keep attacking the net and looked for rebounds, looked for the next play,\u201d said Rickard Rakell, who scored the first powerplay goal. \u201cIt was nice to get us back in the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Crosby and Rakell only suited up for two games during the preseason, they each recorded three goals, amping up for opening night on Oct. 7 against the New York Rangers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel ready to go,\u201d Rakell said. \u201cI’m excited for the season, and I’m excited for our room and our team, and yeah \u2013 I think everybody wants to be a better version of themselves from last year. So, it’s the same mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n
After trailing 3-1 midway through the game, Head Coach Dan Muse called a timeout to get his group refocused. While it was still just a preseason game, these are valuable moments to learn from and take into the regular season.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people, I think, don’t put in a lot of stock [in the preseason],\u201d said Muse. \u201cI think they’re important. And I think tonight, in the third period, the players played like it was important. But now, you’ve been in a situation early in the season where you know that, all right, you can be down by a couple of goals and it’s far from over. We want to play with a never-out-of-it mindset all the time. Credit to them. They came out and they played, and it was great to see them get the job done.\u201d<\/p>\n
And now, there are some difficult personnel decisions to make ahead of Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s going to be a lot of conversations here, starting tonight, with Kyle (Dubas) and management. There\u2019s still some hard decisions to make,\u201d Muse said. \u201cThose decisions are going to need to be made and conversations are going to need to be had. We\u2019re going to prepare.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pittsburgh Penguins ended their preseason on a high note, earning their fifth straight win after defeating the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-189072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}