Sidney Crosby scored twice and Bryan Rust delivered the go-ahead goal midway through the third period as the Pittsburgh Penguins edged Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals 5-3 on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
The 39-year-old Crosby’s two first-period power-play goals boosted his season total to an NHL-best 11. Rust’s fifth of the season helped the Penguins avoid a second straight collapse. Anthony Mantha picked up his seventh of the year for Pittsburgh. Connor Dewar added an empty-net goal in the final minutes.<\/p>\n
Rookie Ben Kindel collected the first two assists of his young career for the Penguins. Arturs Silovs made 28 saves as Pittsburgh stopped a two-game skid.<\/p>\n
Ovechkin fueled a second-period rally by collecting a pair of assists the night after becoming the first player to reach the 900-goal plateau.<\/p>\n
Ryan Strome, Tom Wilson and Rasmus Sandin scored for the Capitals, but the 99th all-time meeting between longtime rivals Crosby and Ovechkin ended with the surprising Penguins maintaining their composure after blowing a three-goal lead.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh has been an early-season surprise under first-year coach Dan Muse, though the Penguins’ hot start hit a bump on Monday when two dominant periods in Toronto morphed into a third-period meltdown in which the Maple Leafs ripped off four straight goals to pull off a stunner.<\/p>\n
Not this time. Pittsburgh’s second-ranked power play scored three times, including a pair by Crosby in the first.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh appeared to be in firm control when Mantha pushed Pittsburgh’s lead to 3-0 just over 2 minutes into the second.<\/p>\n
Washington responded by scoring three times, the last a nifty shot from his knees by Tom Wilson that tied the game 5 seconds before the horn sounded to end the period.<\/p>\n
The Penguins steadied themselves, and Rust put them ahead to stay with a pretty redirect off a cross-ice feed from Evgeni Malkin.<\/p>\n
Capitals: Travel to Tampa Bay on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Penguins: Visit New Jersey on Saturday.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP NHL: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/nhl<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sidney Crosby scored twice and Bryan Rust delivered the go-ahead goal midway through the third period as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4843,73,75,74,1067,8664,726,17922],"class_list":{"0":"post-27455","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-nhl","9":"tag-pittsburgh","10":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","11":"tag-pittsburgh-news","12":"tag-pittsburgh-penguins","13":"tag-sidney-crosby","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-washington-capitals"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}