Overtime woes grow into troubling trend for Penguins
UNIONDALE, N.Y. – When the Pittsburgh Penguins went 5-9 in overtime in the regular season, it was easy to chalk up the poor record to the peculiarities of the tiebreaking format.
From the difficulty of making sensible line changes to the outsized impact a turnover can have, three-on-three hockey provides all sorts of obstacles that five-on-five hockey doesn’t.
Then Game 1 of a first-round series between the Penguins and New York Islanders happened.
Josh Bailey scored less than five minutes into the extra period to give the Islanders a 4-3 victory.
With that came the realization that these Penguins might have some problems with overtime hockey no matter the format or number of players on the ice.
Coming into Game 2 against the Islanders on Friday night, they’d lost five of their last seven playoff games that went to overtime.
Chris Kunitz’s winner five minutes into the second overtime of Game 7 against the Ottawa Senators in the 2017 Eastern Conference finals was unforgettable. Jake Guentzel completing a hat trick in Game 2 of a first-round series against Columbus a few weeks earlier was pretty memorable too.
In between, though, Washington’s Evgeny Kuznetsov and Kevin Shattenkirk, Ottawa’s Bobby Ryan and San Jose’s Joonas Donskoi brought heartache upon the Penguins with overtime heroics of their own.
It’s enough of a track record to suggest that the Penguins might need to adjust their overtime mindset.
With an abundance of world-class talent at the top of the lineup, the Penguins seem to look at overtime as a chance to show their skills on the most dramatic stage possible. They probably need to make sure they shore things up on the defensive side first.
“We discuss with the players just trying to play the game the right way and the details associated with that,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “As games go on, when they go into overtime, we’re trying to discuss with our players to make sure that we’re a team that doesn’t beat itself, that we make good decisions, that we take what the game gives us, that we have an element of patience associated with our game.
“Having said that, hockey’s about making plays, and we always walk that line as a coaching staff of allowing our players to act on their instincts and not over-coaching them in certain situations. We believe we have a group that has pretty good instincts. We try to walk that balance as a coaching staff, allowing these guys to be the players that they are, but also having a certain discipline associated with how we think out there.”
Jonathan Bombulie is the TribLive assistant sports editor. A Greensburg native, he was a hockey reporter for two decades, covering the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins for 17 seasons before joining the Trib in 2015 and covering the Penguins for four seasons, including Stanley Cup championships in 2016-17. He can be reached at jbombulie@triblive.com.
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