Penguins beat Rangers, but lose Jared McCann

Playing his first game in over a week, Penguins goaltender Casey DeSmith led his team to a 5-1 victory against the New York Rangers on Sunday at PPG Paints Arena.

Making 23 saves, DeSmith was more than competent with the task at hand. At the same time, he wasn’t particularly busy.

In fact, the 24 shots the Rangers challenged him on were one of the lowest totals DeSmith has faced in the seven starts he has been afforded this season.

So, as one would imagine, DeSmith lauded his defensemen following the game for allowing him to have a fairly easy night.

But not necessarily for the first two syllables — defense — of their position’s nomenclature.

DeSmith was really impressed with the offense the Penguins’ blue line helped generate against a mostly overwhelmed opponent.

“The defense did a great job of keeping their guys in front of us, breaking the puck out, sending the forwards off on odd-man rushes,” DeSmith said via video conference. “The (defensemen) did pretty much did everything well tonight.”

That notion didn’t exactly hold true early in this game as the Rangers took the first lead 1:18 into regulation.

After Penguins defenseman Mike Matheson pinched into the offensive zone, Rangers forward Mika Zibenejad created a two-on-one rush with forward Alexis Lafreniere against defenseman Cody Ceci. Gliding up the right wing, Zibenejad faked a wrister, jammed up DeSmith’s mechanics and lifted a forehand shot over his blocker on the near side for his third goal of the season.

After that, the Penguins’ looked almost flawless, with the lone exception of forward Jared McCann leaving the game late in the second period due to an undisclosed injury.

A three-goal outburst over the span of 61 seconds put them up for good before the end of the first period.

First, defenseman John Marino collected his first goal of the season at the 16:13 mark. Just as a power-play chance had expired, Marino, utilizing a screen by forward Evan Rodrigues, snapped off a wrister from the right circle of the offensive zone past goaltender Alexandar Georgiev’s blocker on the far side.

Then, at the 16:52 mark, thanks to Matheson forcing Rangers forward Kevin Rooney into a neutral zone turnover, Penguins forward Kasperi Kapanen generated a breakaway, putting a wrister over Georgiev’s blocker for his sixth goal.

It became a 3-1 game at 17:14. Skating a puck out of his own zone, Penguins defenseman Brian Dumoulin approached the center red line and head-manned a forehand pass to forward Sidney Crosby at the offensive blue line. Surging between Rangers defensemen Adam Fox and Ryan Lindgren, Crosby fired a wobbly wrister from the right circle to the far side past Georgiev’s glove.

The Rangers called timeout to regroup and pulled Georgiev in favor of backup Keith Kinkaid.

With the memories of Thursday’s come-from-ahead 4-3 home loss to the Philadelphia Flyers — in which the Penguins lost despite having a three-goal lead — still fresh, the Penguins applied the hard lessons learned from that failure into Sunday’s triumph.

“The game against (Philadelphia), we kind of let our foot off the gas,” Kapanen said. “Today, I think we played a solid 60 minutes and it shows. That’s the way we’ve got to play the game.”

“(The defensemen) created a lot of offense off their defense,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “And we finished on the opportunities that we got. We did a better job of managing the game and that’s an important aspect of winning.”

The Penguins completed the game with two third period goals to secure victory. First, Malkin scored his sixth goal at the 13:57 mark off a two-on-one rush with Kapanen which was initiated by defenseman Marcus Pettersson winning a puck battle in his own right corner and feeding a pass to Malkin.

Forward Zach Aston-Reese capped the scoring with his fifth goal at the 16:37 mark on another sequence initiated by Pettersson claiming the puck out of a battle in his own left circle and getting it up ice for forward Brandon Tanev.

As the cliche goes, the best offense is a good defense.

That was true on Sunday.

“We were so good on our breakouts, just getting the puck in deep,” DeSmith said. “It must have been a really frustrating game for (the Rangers) because we were so good defensively and we played really smart tonight.”