Sully Says: "We Just Didn't Play the Game the Right Way"
The Red Wings scored five unanswered goals to earn a 5-4 overtime win over Pittsburgh on Wednesday
"We think it's game over, you know? We stop playing," Evgeni Malkin said. "The league is too good. It doesn't matter how many goals you lead by; you need to play a full 60 minutes. They score one, they score two, and the game changes quick. Huge mistake for the whole team. It's a great lesson for us. We have a lot of experience in here. The whole team, we're not young. We understand we need to play right, all game."
An already painful result hurts even more considering that it comes on the heels of a humbling 5-1 loss to the New York Islanders on Tuesday. The Penguins seemed ready to put that behind them, as they came out flying, with Drew O'Connor getting on the board 2:36 into play. Jeff Carter tallied on the power play, and Jason Zucker scored twice - once at even strength, and once on the man-advantage.
But once the teams came out for the second period - with Magnus Hellberg replacing Ville Husso in goal for Detroit - it all fell apart for Pittsburgh. Captain Dylan Larkin started the comeback on the power play at the 7:17 mark of the middle frame, with forward Joe Veleno cutting the deficit to 4-2 with 5:28 left.
In the third period, Casey DeSmith did his best to keep Detroit at bay, but the Red Wings scored twice in the final five minutes. Former Penguin David Perron made his old team pay for taking a penalty for too many men with 3:18 remaining, getting the tying goal just 11 seconds in. Defenseman Jake Walman ended up with the game-winner.
When asked if anything needed to be said, Malkin said that Sullivan addressed the team in the locker room for about 10 minutes after the game. "We understand, I understand myself, all of the guys know," Malkin said. "We lost that game and the fans, they hate us right now because we can't play 40 minutes, the second and third period, like this. I know it's a tough loss the last two games. We have great guys here, we need to be smarter."
Here's what the Penguins head coach said to the media following their fourth setback in the past five games (1-2-2).
Obviously a good start for you. But the last 42 minutes, not so much. Just what changed there? They obviously had some pushback, but what didn't go right for your team?"We just didn't play the game the right way. I mean, it's as simple as that. We didn't play the game the right way. We didn't manage the game. We didn't manage the puck. We're not playing a collective game right now. The game is too difficult if you don't play in a five-man unit out there. For whatever reason, the last few games, we're disconnected. And that's our challenge, is to fix it."
Is there a cause for greater concern than a singular loss tonight? Are there bigger issues at play? "There's always issues. I mean, that's pro sports. Every team has challenges. They go through ups and downs, you know? And so, do we have challenges? Yeah. I don't think issues is the right word, I think challenge is the right word. And we have some that we got to fix."
Coming into this season, one of the things you wanted take a lot of pride in was being a hard team to play against, in a lot of ways. I know you're missing a couple of guys [Josh Archibald, Ryan Poehling, Jeff Petry and Chad Ruhwedel are all sidelined due to injury] who make your team that way because of who they are and what they do. But what more do you need, and how important is it to get back to that? "I think you can become hard to play against so many different ways. For me, the most important thing that needs to happen is teams that are hard to play against don't beat themselves. If you're going to get beat, it's going to be because the team brings a tremendous effort and pays a significant price to beat you. That's rule number one. We can't beat ourselves. And when you look at the last few games, we're beating ourselves in a lot of ways. Give our opponents credit, not to take anything away from them. But I look at the way the games have played out, and I just think the standard is higher, and none of us are living up to it, myself included. We got to do a better job coaching this group, so that we understand what it takes to win. And right now, we don't. For me, one of the easiest ways to beat yourself is to mismanage the puck, or not manage the game. When you're careless with your puck possession, you feed your opponent's transition. We use the phrase easy offense - we're giving teams easy offense. We'd love to get that. When we're handing teams easy offense, it's hard to win that way. In my experience, if you mismanage the puck you can't win. Not consistently, anyway."
Your penalty kill came in on a bit of a hot streak and gave up two goals tonight. Obviously the first one came when Brock McGinn lost his stick, but was there anything that wasn't connecting for the penalty kill overall in this game? "I think the first one was a case where we would have had a clear and a stick breaks. That happens. That's hockey. The second one, a lot broke down. We just didn't get the job done. We didn't execute."
