The Penguins welcome back Bryan Rust from injury and shake up the lines a little to put Rickard Rakell back at center and put Ben Kindel up with Evgeni Malkin. Stuart Skinner gets a second-straight game in net.<\/p>\n
Their hosts are rolling with this lineup.<\/p>\n
Tampa starts off the game hot getting seven of the first nine shots, and the first goal. Anthony Cirelli follows up on a rebound to open the scoring.<\/p>\n
The Penguins settle down after that and get to their game. Sam Girard steps up in the zone and makes a pass over to Rickard Rakell. Rakell uses his skates to kick the puck up to his stick for a nifty move and finish. 1-1.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh takes their first lead, courtesy of Egor Chinakhov. Chinakhov skates to the outside of the defense then gets a rising backhand shot that goes far-side. 2-1 Pens.<\/p>\n
Next up come the first power plays of the night, Connor Clifton is guilty of interference when a Tampa player drives to the net. While on the PK, Erik Karlsson lifts a sky pass for Noel Acciari and a Lightning player has to hold Acciari on his drive to the net.<\/p>\n
Shots are 11 a piece, good news for the Penguins to be able to create their looks at the net. They made the most of it and take a one-goal lead into the first break.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh starts the period on a short carryover power play, but it\u2019s Tampa who scores. An odd bounce handcuffs Karlsson and Rust which Cirelli corals and is off to the races. He dekes and beats Skinner to make it a 2-2 game.<\/p>\n
Tampa gains momentum for that and nearly score again if not for Girard pulling a puck away from the crease in a scramble. A bit later Girard stays active by breaking up a Nikita Kucherov pass that might have done damage if it got through.<\/p>\n
The Lightning re-gain the lead with 5:52 to play. Tampa\u2019s top line pushes up the ice, Jake Guentzel\u2019s shot goes wide but the puck ramps back into the danger zone where Brayden Point gets it and scores from in close. 3-2 TB.<\/p>\n
Tampa gets a goal in the last minute, Yanni Gourde passed from behind the net to Zemgus Girgensons and he was able to work it to the backhand and put in a goal to extend the lead to 4-2.<\/p>\n
Tough period for the Pens, giving up goals at the beginning and end of it puts them behind. Shots are 9-8 TB in the second period, but shot attempts in the game are 47-33 TB through 40. They\u2019re playing the type of game they want to play.<\/p>\n
Evgeni Malkin\u2019s temper boils over out of frustration, he gets four minutes worth of penalties after a scrum, taking a Tampa player away for two. The Lightning get their second power play of the night but come no closer to scoring than a post hit by Darren Raddysh.<\/p>\n
Letang skates up the ice and gets hooked to draw a power play. It doesn\u2019t go well, the Pens match their number of shots in the first ten minutes of the period (0) on their power play.<\/p>\n
Soon after that expires, Connor Dewar is the latest to get rung up on a penalty, though Tampa\u2019s power play is soon negated by a penalty by themselves.<\/p>\n
Nikita Kucherov is at the point of the game where he\u2019s trying to create a special highlight; he puts the puck through Girard\u2019s triangle \u2014twice \u2014 on a rush but doesn\u2019t score. On his next shift, Kucherov whips a rolling puck on a bit of a no-look all the way from wall that beats Skinner high. 5-2. Yep, that\u2019s a highlight goal from a special player.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh lifts Skinner for an extra skater with over 5 minutes to go. Doesn\u2019t last that long until Cirelli completes his hat trick. 6-2.<\/p>\n
The Penguins get a late power play and Chinakhov provides a somewhat meaningless buzzer beater to wrist an absolutely filthy wrister in with 1:5 seconds left. Not that meaningless I guess, being as it\u2019s Chinakhov\u2019s 20th of the season.<\/p>\n
Chinakhov often, often, often will cut into the middle of the ice on a rush with the puck on his stick (such a play got him crushed with an open ice hit against Calgary early in his Pittsburgh stint). That\u2019s gotta be the book on him, so it was brilliant to go off-script and use his speed to beat Ryan McDonagh towards the outside in the first period. The finish to get enough on a backhander to beat a goalie the caliber of Vasilevskiy speaks for itself, what a talent Chinakhov is.Sam Girard looks much more comfortable and confident lately, today was probably his best game yet as a Penguin. He\u2019s starting to use his legs to extend plays and then he\u2019s got the hands to make something happen. Two assists in the first period and a couple of other sequences were very positive to see. His partner Kris Letang also looks like he\u2019s settling into a physical and more careful role, which from an article <\/a>earlier today has been working lately. It truly helps the team so much seeing that pair gel and continue to stack up quality performances.Glad to see Evgeni Malkin apparently shake off blocking a shot to the skate in the first period. With the way Malkin\u2019s second half of the season has been going it\u2019s been one bad break after another, the last thing he needed was taking more damage. Malkin usually has great games against Tampa, this certainly wasn\u2019t one of them.Rust came back from injury to play, but he visibly didn\u2019t look that good moving around the ice. He was skating at times in an unnatural and unsteady way, not looking like a fluid NHL skater. Maybe he\u2019s on the upswing from his unspecified lower body injury, didn\u2019t look excessively comfortable out there on this day. After watching Rust for a decade you gain a little bit of knowledge for seeing him out there, something didn\u2019t look quite right.The Pens looked good at times early on, though for the most part Tampa played like a stronger team. They\u2019re very persistent when it comes to puck battles and don\u2019t give up much easily without getting on the opponent and competing for every inch. Wouldn\u2019t blame Crosby if he has a nightmare tonight where Gourde is hounding him relentlessly considering that happened all night.By the end of the night, maybe the Pens packed it in but they sure didn\u2019t make a push in the third period. That\u2019s unlike them, they usually don\u2019t go away as quietly as they did today. The damage was done with a poor second period and there wasn\u2019t anything in the cards for even the faintest hints of a comeback attempt.This always kinda seemed like a house money game for the Penguins after the hugely important wins on Monday and Tuesday. Maybe all that exertion caught up with them, maybe they just caught a very good opponent on one of their better nights. (And, as always, it\u2019s tends to be a bit of both). The good news for Pittsburgh is this won\u2019t hurt them too much thanks to the other scores: Columbus and Philadelphia lost in regulation, even Washington looks like they\u2019re about to fall. This was the \u2018game in hand\u2019 over the Islanders, who didn\u2019t play tonight and now have as many GP as the Pens. Playoff positioning didn\u2019t take any hits tonight – and now Pittsburgh gets to play all of their last six games against teams who won\u2019t be going to the playoffs.<\/p>\n Not a banner night for the Pens, they got ahead early but gave up a shorthanded goal that took a lot of wind of their sails and Tampa ended up going right by them. On to the next on Saturday afternoon against Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Penguins welcome back Bryan Rust from injury and shake up the lines a little to put Rickard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":561480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[111671,385,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-561479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-game-recaps","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}