Malkin's Confidence-Boosting Goal Helps Penguins Get a Point

Evgeni Malkin wasn’t feeling the greatest after being part of an own goal for Pittsburgh on Monday in Arizona when he couldn’t corral Kris Letang’s pass during a delayed penalty call in a 5-2 loss to the Coyotes. "It’s a little bit down for my confidence," he said.

Malkin felt like he needed to score in Pittsburgh’s next game on Friday versus Florida, and he delivered – getting the tying goal with 41.5 seconds left in regulation to force overtime. He helped the Penguins get a big point in their 3-2 shootout setback.

“I hope now I feel so much better because everybody show me this video when I score own net, it’s like, I know it’s bad luck. Sometimes it happens,” said Malkin, who now has 16 goals this season. “We lost the last two games (to Arizona and Vegas), we did not play great.

“We’re back home and we play back-to-back, huge game tonight, and we understand we’re still fighting for playoffs, you know? We fight all night and I try to help the team win every game. Every goal is very important for me, but after the last game, it’s huge for me, for sure.”

As Head Coach Mike Sullivan said earlier in the week, confidence is such a big part of playing sports, and when a player like Malkin goes through some challenging times, he’s no different than anybody else in the sense that doubt creeps in.

“He's still an elite player in this game, we believe strongly that he's going to be part of the solution here moving forward. He's just too talented a guy, he's too good of a person not to be,” Sullivan said.

“Nobody’s harder on himself than Geno. He understands that we rely on him to produce offense for us and when he doesn’t, nobody feels it more than he does. So it's never from a lack of effort with G, he's a hard-working guy, he’s a real competitive guy. So hopefully, that goal at the end, that's a huge goal that helps us get a hard-earned point. Hopefully, he'll gain a bit of confidence from that.”

It was an especially important goal considering the Penguins struggled on the man-advantage, going 1-for-8 on the night – though at first, they couldn’t have asked for a better start.

Letang drew a penalty on the first shift, and Jake Guentzel converted with 59 seconds to go on that man-advantage under two minutes into the evening, which ended a 0-for-14 drought. But the Panthers answered back with a power-play goal of their own shortly after.

Florida then made the Penguins pay on a tough sequence for Letang, who first got called for tripping, and then for interference during the delayed penalty call. He had made contact Aleksander Barkov, who went into the boards awkwardly and was down on the ice for a while (Barkov returned to the game a few minutes later after going to the locker room).

“I was going to the puck and Barkov kind of stepped in front of me, so I peeled off,” Letang said. “And I think I just put my hand on him and then either my stick or my skate clipped him and I think his foot got caught. But I did not hit him, that’s for sure.”

Florida converted one second into Letang’s second minor to take a 2-1 lead. The Penguins had a huge opportunity to respond a few minutes later when Sam Bennett got called for a double minor of his own, with 22 seconds left on a penalty to teammate Kevin Stenlund.

However, the Penguins couldn’t take advantage of their six straight minutes on the power play, and then got held scoreless on their first chance in the third. Sullivan switched up the units for their eighth and final chance with 5:25 to go in regulation, going with Letang, Crosby, Guentzel, Bryan Rust and Valtteri Puustinen on one, and Malkin, Erik Karlsson, Lars Eller, Jeff Carter and Rickard Rakell on the other.

“We have to stick with it. I mean, it's not been easy,” Letang said. “We get some traction sometimes and at some other points, we get discouraged. We have to stick with it and make sure that any chance we have to step on the ice and have a power play, we try to make a difference.”

Alex Nedeljkovic was especially terrific in overtime, making 29 saves on the night. Here’s what Sullivan had to say after the game before the Penguins return to action on Saturday versus Montreal at PPG Paints Arena, their final contest before the bye week/All-Star break.

On the power play: “I thought there were moments when they looked pretty good. There were others where we were a little bit disconnected. Obviously, it's disappointing we didn't score more. I thought we had some looks that we didn’t necessarily finish on. I just think we got to stick with it. We made some tweaks down the stretch there at the end with some different personnel groups. I don’t know where we'll go going forward, we'll discuss that as a coaching staff, but I know that the guys that are on it care deeply about the powerplay and understand how important it is to helping us win and so these guys put a lot of pressure on themselves to produce for us in most situations and when it doesn’t go the right way just like I was talking about Geno, all those guys they're proud guys and nobody cares more than they do so. We’re just going to stay with it here.”

On the team staying poised when the game got chippy after the Letang-Barkov sequence: “I thought our guys did a great job. I mean, for me it was I don't know what everybody was upset about. It was barely contact. It was incidental contact, it wasn’t even a penalty. So, I don't know why everybody was up in arms about it. For me, Letang was playing hockey but listen, Tangers a competitive guy, we have competitive guys, they're a competitive team. There was an emotional game. And so, I think in those situations, both teams are invested, and so it's just part of it, makes for exciting hockey.”

On Nedeljkovic settling in as the game went on: “I thought that Ned made some real timely saves for us. It was a low-scoring game, was a competitive game. There were some pretty good looks on both sides. I thought Ned was there for us. He made a timely save in the overtime, he had a solid game for us.”