Penguins' reserves rout Maple Leafs at home

Even if they were at home at PPG Paints Arena, the Pittsburgh Penguins were not the marquee team in their encounter Saturday night against the Toronto Maple Leafs.

When you’re missing roughly $31.58 million of salary cap space in the form of forwards Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Bryan Rust, Jeff Carter and now defenseman Kris Letang, most of your star power has been swallowed up by a black hole.

Yet, a menagerie of replacements such as forwards Evan Rodrigues, Drew O’Connor and Brian Boyle as well as defensemen Marcus Pettersson and Mark Friedman looked like a supernova against the high-profile but uninspired Maple Leafs, routing them, 7-1, in a display that was a perfect example of taking advantage of opportunity given.

“Sometimes, when we have a full complement of players, it’s easy to defer to the Crosbys and the Malkins to get it done,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said. “Maybe the silver lining in this is that everyone in our lineup tonight has to make a positive impact on the game. That’s the mindset that we have to have. Because we don’t have the luxury of deferring to Crosby or Malkin.”

The Penguins couldn’t defer to Letang either after the six-time All-Star defenseman was placed into the NHL’s protocol for covid-19 on Saturday morning. He was replaced by Friedman, a reserve.

O’Connor, a rookie with all of 14 games of NHL experience, opened the contest as the Penguins’ default second-line center and opened the scoring 11 minutes, 53 seconds into the game.

Corralling a puck at the left point of the offensive zone, Pettersson chucked a wrister toward the cage. O’Connor was stationed above the crease and steered his backside toward the puck, deflecting it with his left hip beyond goaltender Jack Campbell’s blocker for his second goal of the season (and his career).

O’Connor had actually dropped his left glove on the sequence and was defending his hand to a certain degree.

“I lost my glove on the faceoff, so I was kind of trying to not let it hit my hand,” O’Connor said. “I saw it coming, I didn’t try to hit it in. I just tried to be there, I guess. It just hit me and went in.”

Veteran Maple Leafs forward Jason Spezza, who has a tidy 1,183 games on his NHL resume, responded 51 seconds later with his third goal of the season (and 354th of his career).

The Penguins scored twice in the first 1:53 of the second period and never looked back.

First, at the 1:37 mark, defenseman Mike Matheson entered the offensive zone on the left wing, swooped behind the cage then fired a wraparound forehand shot that glanced off Maple Leafs defenseman Justin Holl’s stick and hopped into the cage over Campbell’s left skate for Matheson’s first goal.

Then, 14 seconds later, forward Jason Zucker threw a seemingly harmless wrister toward the cage. Harm ensued when it glanced off Maple Leafs defenseman Timothy Liljegren’s right shin and caromed by Campbell’s blocker on the near side for Zucker’s second goal.

Another inadvertent deflection put the Penguins up by three goals at 11:01 of the middle frame.

Rushing into the offensive zone on the left wing, O’Connor fended off a backcheck by Maple Leafs forward Alexander Kerfoot and forced a pass to Friedman moving in off the right wing. One-time Penguins draft pick Jake Muzzin blocked the pass attempt with his left skate but directed the puck into his own cage past Campbell’s left boot, resulting in a goal for O’Connor.

Pettersson scored a more conventional goal, his first of the season, at 13:59 of the second. Rodrigues, temporarily serving as the team’s top center, gained the offensive zone then fed a pass from the right circle to the slot for a trailing Pettersson, who stroked a wrister past Campbell’s blocker to record his career-best third point of the contest.

Michael Hutchinson replaced Campbell to open the third, but that did little to stymie the Penguins, who went up 6-1 only 20 seconds into the period.

Stealing a puck off Spezza in front of the visiting bench, Penguins forward Dominik Simon reversed course and gained the offensive blue line on the left wing. Allowing the play to develop, he fed a subtle pass to the right circle for Boyle, who whipped a one-timer past Hutchinson’s blocker on the far side for his second goal.

The Penguins capped the scoring at 2:24 of the third when Rodrigues scored his third goal. Working with a man advantage, Matheson fed a pass from center point above the right circle for Rodrigues, recently promoted to the top power-play unit. After surveying for a shooting lane, Rodrigues lasered a wrister past a screen from linemate Jake Guenztel and toasted Hutchinson’s glove on the far side.

Goaltender Tristan Jarry — the only member of the Penguins’ lineup who has played in an All-Star Game, at least at the NHL level — made 28 saves, including 16 the first period alone, to improve his record to 3-0-1 as his undermanned squad came away with a resounding triumph against an opponent that dressed five All-Stars.

“We’ve been in this situation before with a lot of guys missing,” Pettersson said. “We’ve always talked about having that next-guy-up mentality. We have a great system to rely on and everybody trusts.

“I think it shows. It did tonight.”