Tim Benz: Plenty of reasons why being better wasn't good enough in Calgary for slumping Penguins

For the Pittsburgh Penguins (3-4-1) on Tuesday night, quite a lot went right in Calgary against the Pacific Division-leading Flames (5-0-1).

• The Pens outshot their hosts 38-25.

• Pittsburgh won 63% of the faceoffs and blocked 21 shots.

• The power play scored one goal and posted another just as a penalty was expiring.

• The penalty kill was clean in four opportunities.

• The Penguins got an All-Star performance from a bottom-six player in Noel Acciari. He scored once, blocked five shots, applied five hits and won seven of nine faceoffs.

Unfortunately, just enough went wrong to ruin the effort.

• The Pens let two different leads slip through their fingers in the third period.

• The club’s puck management resulted in 17 giveaways.

• A 6-on-5 goal from Nazim Kadri forced overtime.

• Star players Sidney Crosby, Kris Letang and Evgeni Malkin were all held without a goal during the game and went a collective 0 for 3 in the shootout.

• Flames goalie Dustin Wolf outdueled Alex Nedeljkovic in the shootout, and the Penguins left a point on the table, suffering a 4-3 defeat.

In a vacuum, getting a road point against a first-place team in a game like that isn’t all that bad. Unfortunately, it’s Pittsburgh’s third loss in a row after dropping a 6-3 contest in Winnipeg on Sunday and a 4-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Friday.

“I thought we were much better with our team defense,” head coach Mike Sullivan said Tuesday night via the team’s website. “We carried most of the play five-on-five.”

While the power play essentially scored two of the three goals, it also allowed a few shorthanded chances that could’ve tilted the game in the wrong direction earlier in the process.

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“Some of the best scoring chances they got were against our power play,” Sullivan said. “We’ve got to be more responsible with the puck, and we’ve got to make sure we execute on the plays we’re making.

“Sometimes, I think they just grow a little bit impatient instead of just taking what the game gives them out there. … They wanted to make something happen off the first pass. If it’s there, that’s fine. If it’s not, we’ve got to keep our patience, work the perimeter of the rink, and manipulate the penalty to kill a little bit. Then some opportunities will open up.”

Sullivan referred to those issues as “a work in progress.” Other things one could describe as works in progress in Pittsburgh include balancing the city and county budgets, alleviating traffic concerns over road construction and managing the housing situation.

I expect all of those other issues to be solved before the Penguins stop giving up scoring chances on their own power play.

The same could be said of puck management in general, giving up leads and seemingly always having the second-best goalie on the ice. Even on nights when Nedeljkovic, Tristan Jarry or Joel Blomqvist are good, they often aren’t good enough to be better than the other guy at the opposite end of the rink.

The Pens still have two more games to go on this road trip: Friday in Edmonton and Saturday in Vancouver. They went 1-2-1 against those teams last year, getting outscored 10-1 by the Oilers in their two meetings.

Eight games into this season, Sullivan’s team has only won three times. Aside from the power play scoring more often, there is little evidence to suggest that this Penguins club is all that different from what we’ve seen the past two years when the franchise failed to make the playoffs.

Figuring out a way to salvage a pair of wins this weekend would go a long way toward changing that opinion. But it seems like there is also an even longer way to go before making that happen.

LISTEN: Tim Benz and Brian Metzer talk about the Penguins latest loss to the Calgary Flames.