Three games over six days, three early deficits for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Is falling behind 3-0 in road games last week at the Boston Bruins and New York Islanders, and 2-0 at home Saturday against the Chicago Blackhawks, indicative of mere circumstance and bad luck? Or indicative of a bad trend that needs to be addressed?
The Penguins seem to fall in the camp of the former.
“I don’t know that (early-game struggles) is an issue,” coach Mike Sullivan said.
The Penguins regained the lead in all three of last week’s games, although they surrendered it again and lost to Boston.
“If you look at some of the goals, some of them weren’t great; they were bad bounces or things like that,” forward Jared McCann said. “So, some of it you can’t control.”
For the second consecutive game, the Penguins staged a furious comeback on one of the Eastern Conference's top teams.
— Seth Rorabaugh (@SethRorabaugh) November 8, 2019
Only this time, their fourth goal actually won the game.
"You need just to fight every shift."https://t.co/dtugwbDpUd
The Penguins have allowed the opponent to score the first goal in 11 of 17 games and have led at the first intermission just twice all season. The first period is the lone period in which the Penguins have scored fewer goals than their opponents. They have just eight first-period goals; by comparison, the Penguins have 26 second-period goals and 21 third-period tallies.
Sullivan, though, cited small sample size for skewing the data on the Penguins’ perceived slow starts. As proof, he noted that two second periods (against Chicago on Saturday and at Dallas on Oct. 26) have been two of their worst-played periods of the season. So he isn’t ready to make any blanket judgments that his team is at its worst at the start of games.
“I think sometimes those types of numbers will probably even out in the long term, in the big picture,” Sullivan said. “Sometimes it’s just how the game is played. Sometimes it takes a while to wear teams down. Sometimes you run into a hot goalie. There are so many circumstances that surround it, it’s hard to look at any one thing.”
