Tim Benz: Penguins flip the script in rare win over Devils

The 2023-24 Pittsburgh Penguins have had their share of fatal flaws all year.

• A lousy power play

• A failure to hold multi-goal leads

• Up-and-down goaltending

• Giving up goals moments after scoring them

• Disappointing results in three-on-three overtime

• Poor performance on the road

All of those reasons are why the Penguins have been in hockey hospice pretty much since the holidays.

But an ability to flip the script on many of those trends Tuesday night in New Jersey is a big reason why the Penguins were able to beat the Devils 6-3, keeping their flickering playoff pulse for at least another day.

In this game, it was the Penguins who came back from a 3-1 third-period deficit to claim victory on the heels of recent blown multi-goal leads in the third period of costly losses at Columbus and Colorado.

In this road game, the Penguins strung together multiple goals in a row to catch up and then surpass the opposition, as opposed to ceding goals back to the other team once momentum had been temporarily attained.

Instead, on Tuesday, head coach Mike Sullivan’s skaters scored five unanswered goals in the third period to turn a 3-1 deficit into a 6-3 victory.

“It was a gutsy effort by our guys. We could tell early on we didn’t have a lot of energy,” Sullivan said via a postgame interview aired on SportsNet Pittsburgh. “I give our players a lot of credit. We hung in there. We dug in.”

Also, in this game, that normally anemic power play (14.6%, 30th in the league) registered a crucial power-play goal from Sidney Crosby early in the third period to narrow the gap.

A POWER-PLAY GOAL FOR PITTSBURGH! ????

Sidney Crosby extends his point streak to six games (5G-9A). Crosby's 14 points (5G-9A) since Mar. 24 rank first in the NHL. pic.twitter.com/uCFqp64A2j

— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) April 3, 2024

“I think it was desperation,” Crosby said. “We knew it was going to be an uphill climb. But it was good to get one on the power play. I thought we really got a lot of momentum there and built off of it.”

The team also got clutch goaltending from Alex Nedeljkovic, stopping 23 of 26 shots, many of which came in the first two periods when a lesser effort would have resulted in a blowout before the Zambonis came out for a second time.

“He’s a fierce competitor,” Sullivan said of Nedeljkovic. “He wants the net. He wants to be in there. He wants to compete. And he battles.”

All of those departures from the norm allowed the Pens to beat New Jersey for the first time since February 2022, ending a winless stretch that spanned seven games.

To put that in context, the last time the Penguins beat the Devils, Kenny Pickett had yet to be drafted and Mitch Trubisky had yet to be signed by the Steelers.

So, uh, yeah, a lot has happened since then.

Unfortunately, this year, most of it has been negative for the Penguins. They are 34-30-11 and they have only 79 points. That’s good for just 11th place in the Eastern Conference, and they still need to displace at least three more teams before getting into a playoff spot.

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The Washington Capitals currently hold the last wild card with 82 points. The good news for the Penguins is that they can take matters into their own hands in their next game since it’s a trip to D.C.

“It’s a huge back-to-back, overall,” defenseman Marcus Pettersson said of beating the Devils on Tuesday and topping the New York Rangers 5-2 on Monday. “We are still in this fight. We have got another huge game coming up against a team we are chasing.”

The other side of the coin, though, is that the Penguins haven’t won three in a row since Feb. 22-27. And they haven’t won more than three in a row since Nov. 14.

Yes, of all the major faults the 2023-24 Penguins have shown, their eventual downfall will likely prove to be an inability to sustain momentum by extending a winning streak to make up for previous points forfeited along the way of this largely rudderless season.

If the Penguins want to change that narrative, their last best chance to do so will be Thursday night in Washington.

Listen: Tim Benz and Brian Metzer talk Penguins hockey