Yohe’s 10 observations: Careless Penguins very much earned this loss in Toronto

TORONTO — Remove the glorious comeback and the Sidney Crosby lovefest that took place two nights earlier against the Flyers, and it could be reasonably concluded that the Penguins weren’t very good Tuesday.

They tried the same approach — high-risk, lackadaisical at times and generally unaware — against a competent team Thursday at Scotiabank Arena. It didn’t go so well.

The Maple Leafs took advantage of a very careless Penguins team and rolled to a 4-1 victory.

It was clear from the early stages that the Penguins’ mental toughness and decision-making, both of which have been somewhat responsible for their wonderful season, were nowhere to be found.

“We obviously did not have our best,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “I don’t think we were hard enough to play against. You can’t give a team of that caliber the chances we did tonight.”

Auston Matthews, who later left the game temporarily with a bizarre injury after skating directly into the goal post, needed only 21 seconds to start the scoring. With Brian Dumoulin out of position and Crosby covering at the left point, Matthews snuck behind Crosby and ultimately beat Tristan Jarry on a breakaway to begin the evening on a very ominous note for the visiting team. The Penguins didn’t give up — they never do — but they looked completely out of sorts most of the game from a mental standpoint, making one bad decision after another.

Morgan Rielly, David Kampf and Michael Bunting also scored for the Maple Leafs.

Evgeni Malkin scored for the Penguins in the third period when the game was essentially over.

Crosby said this setback can be a learning experience.

“I think you’ve got to (learn from it),” he said. “But you try to move by it. We know we can be better and we can execute better. We’ve got to be better as far as making plays.”

They’ll have quite a challenge when they next take the ice as the Carolina Hurricanes come to Pittsburgh for a Sunday afternoon showdown.

“We have the opportunity Sunday to hit the reset button and play the hockey we know we are capable of,” Sullivan said.

Ten postgame observations

• The Penguins outshot the Maple Leafs 46-29. If you didn’t see this game, please don’t be deceived by the shot total. It indicates the Penguins never give up. They really don’t. Effort is never a problem and even when the game was over, they were plugging away.

And yes, the Penguins did have some golden opportunities. Jeff Carter and Jake Guentzel were stopped by Jack Campbell on first-period breakaways and, without question, Campbell was excellent. If you stop 45 of 46 shots, you can take a bow, and he was sharp all night.

Still, the Penguins were sloppy beyond words and it started from the very first shift. Their decision-making in the first two periods was simply brutal. They forced passes through the center of the ice, didn’t cover for each other adequately, weren’t hard on pucks and gave the Maple Leafs a disproportionate amount of odd-man rushes. Jarry stopped 25 of 29 shots which, on paper, isn’t so impressive. He was quite good, though.

The Penguins were just overly careless with the puck all evening. They have a tendency to do this when they don’t play well, but this was an excessive amount of carelessness. They tried to out-skill their way through the Maple Leafs, and Toronto was having none of it.

Sullivan said before the game that you “can’t score your way to a championship,” which is his way of suggesting that hard work, attention to detail and being responsible with the puck are every bit as important to winning the Stanley Cup as is talent. His team didn’t heed the warning.

• Here’s something you won’t read in this space particularly often. Crosby had a really rough night. He couldn’t do anything right all evening.

Just feeding off the atmosphere ⚡️😉pic.twitter.com/EMoWVVTuP9

— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) February 18, 2022

Lots of things happened on the game’s opening goal, none of them especially good. Dumoulin hasn’t looked right for three games now, and his decision to pinch on this place wasn’t a particularly good one.

Bryan Rust then had a chance to make a play on the puck but wasn’t able to handle it.

Crosby, you’ll note in the video, made the right decision to retreat to the point and initially skated with Matthews. However, Crosby lost track of Toronto’s young star, and Matthews beat Jarry cleanly on the breakaway.

This goal very much foreshadowed the way the rest of the game would go. It just wasn’t pretty. The Penguins weren’t sharp, didn’t communicate like they usually do and simply looked out of sorts.

Crosby just looked a bit off all game, especially with his passing. Almost every pass was a smidge late or a smidge early, it seemed. It was definitely one of his worst performances of the season. Like anyone else, he’s human. The last 48 hours have been pretty emotional for him. The good news is, he doesn’t have two bad games in a row. He’ll be just fine.

• If that first goal foreshadowed what was to come, another one symbolized the evening perfectly.

With 6:27 remaining in the third period, Crosby used his glove to direct the puck toward Guentzel. It was a really smart play and Guentzel may have had an opportunity on a rush, given that a couple of Maple Leafs were trapped on the play.

However, Guentzel waited until the puck reached the neutral zone before he touched it. Thus, it was correctly called a hand pass.

If we’re talking pure hockey intelligence, Guentzel is one of the Penguins’ two or three smartest players. He has outrageously strong hockey sense. And yet, he didn’t touch the puck. Given that he argued with the linesman immediately after the whistle, I’m going to assume that Guentzel didn’t know Crosby used his hand on the puck.

But that’s kind of the point. The Penguins played plenty hard for most of the night, but there was a noticeable lack of awareness, and that’s something we don’t say about the Penguins very often. And we never say it about Guentzel.

• It’s very difficult for me to be critical of this team. The Penguins are on pace for 114 points. They were 48 hours removed from the emotional high of the season. The Maple Leafs are very good. It’s a long season. These things happen.

So yes, it was probably a loss you could feel coming. That doesn’t, however, change the reality that the Penguins’ decision-making was horrid. And as typically is the case, it was their best players making the majority of the blunders.

Against Philadelphia, Malkin was the biggest offender. This time, Crosby and Kris Letang made an unusually high amount of mistakes.

But still, when looking at the big picture, it must be understood that games like this happen to the best teams. I wouldn’t panic.

• Dumoulin hasn’t looked right during the last three games. At all. I wonder if he’s banged up a bit. He was outstanding in the first two games following the NHL All-Star Break in Boston and Ottawa. Two of his best games of the year. In the three games that have followed, he’s looked a little shaky. A lot shaky, actually.

Keep an eye on him. His importance to the Penguins should never be discounted.

• My gosh, what a horrendous job by the Penguins’ power play tonight. They gave up a short-handed goal to Kampf, but that wasn’t even the half of it. The entries were, to be kind, sloppy. There was a general refusal to shoot the puck and the Penguins seemed more interested in jamming passes through the center of the ice than they did generating reasonable scoring opportunities.

Everyone was to blame on the top power-play unit, though I thought Letang’s decision-making with the man advantage was especially poor. A night to forget for the power play.

• I’m old enough to remember when Evan Rodrigues was destroying the league. What happened to that guy? If anything, he hurt the Penguins against the Maple Leafs.

In Rodrigues’ last 18 games, he’s produced no goals and three assists. In the 18 games before that, Rodrigues produced nine goals and 19 points.

So, who is the real Rodrigues? I don’t know. But I do know that this is a player whose confidence fluctuates wildly, more than other players. It’s a great recipe for a streaky player, which is what he is.

He committed two bad penalties against Toronto. Also, there was a strange play in the first period in which he was knocked down by the Penguins bench and took almost 10 seconds to get up. He didn’t look hurt. And he sure as heck didn’t look urgent.

One of the things that has made the Penguins so dangerous is their ability to generate secondary scoring. Rodrigues had been the ringleader of that, but lately, he’s all but disappeared. This is a big problem in the short term and in the long term. He’s a free agent this summer. Do you keep him? Offer him big money? Let him go?

Tough to say, but the three points in his past 18 games aren’t helping his cause.

• Matthews skated mouth-first into the goal post while chasing Crosby. Really.

Auston Matthews goes face-first into the post pic.twitter.com/fi5ZPqh8Gx

— Omar (@TicTacTOmar) February 18, 2022

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Matthews immediately went down the runway to the locker room following this play. Watching it live, I thought he skated into the net on purpose to get a whistle because something had just happened to him earlier.

Really weird.

• The Maple Leafs were really impressive in the offensive zone all game. I don’t recall seeing a team look more physically dominant against the Penguins all season. They knocked the Penguins off pucks all games and out-skilled them on more than one occasion.

I wasn’t the least bit impressed with how the Penguins played, but I did like what I saw from Toronto’s game. The Maple Leafs will likely be forced to go through the Lightning and Panthers if they’re going to even make it to the Eastern Conference final. That’s tough. Can they beat those teams? My instinct says no, but if Campbell is going to play at this level, it’s not impossible.

• So, here we go. The Penguins have 31 games remaining, including three against Carolina and four against the Rangers. They get their first glimpse at the impressive Hurricanes on Sunday at PPG Paints Arena. They’ll have some extra time to think about it, by the way.

The Penguins were scheduled to fly home Thursday night and practice Friday. However, a significant snowstorm grounded the Penguins in Toronto. They won’t practice Friday.

So, they get some extra time to think about this performance. It won’t be pleasant.

(Photo: Vaughn Ridley / NHLI via Getty Images)