Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Pens drop another one, 4-3 to the Leafs


It was another game at the Consol Energy Center, and another 1 goal loss for your Pittsburgh Penguins.

Toronto's Clarke MacArthur scored his third and fourth goals of the young season, but please don’t mistake this kid for Steven Stamkos.

Deryk Engellend is now 1-0 in fights this season. He fired off a punch that caught Maple Leaf goon Colton Orr straight in the mouth, knocking him down to the ice. It was definitely one of the few highlights from tonight’s effort. It was also definitely worth a link so you can see it.



First lesson in Defense 101 against Evgeni Malkin. You get beat by Malkin who is now on a breakaway on your goaltender. All you have to do now is haul him down from behind to generate a penalty shot. Malkin not only hasn’t scored on a penalty shot in 4 tries, but he looks like a buffoon doing it. Maybe Gordon Bombay needs to teach Geno the triple deke.

Sidney Crosby finally got his first goal of the season off his own rebound. It came in the closing seconds of the second period and at least got the Penguins back into the game.

Marc-Andre Fleury? Dude come on! 4 goals on 14 shots? An .853 Save % through 3 games? Just isn’t going to cut it. Flower needs to play better. Granted we were missing our top two shutdown defensemen but still. When you’ve averaging over 3 goals (3.41) against per game, you aren’t going to win a lot of games. Something is wrong with his psyche at this point and I’m starting to wonder if he’ll ever get back to the level we saw in the two Stanley Cup Finals.

The Pens are generating a lot of good scoring opportunities they just need to start putting the puck in the net. Maybe it's just been a case of playing some good teams early on, and perhaps their next opponent can provide just the tonic the Pens need to snap out of this early funk.

Pens are now 0-3 at the Consol Energy Center. Not exactly how Penguin fans would have scripted it. They’ll try Friday night against the Islanders to get their first win in the new barn.

4 comments:

Sean o said...

Mighty ducks. You pulled out the mighty duck quote. Classic. In my opinon at least two of the goals were not flowers fault. Cross ice passes should never get through like that.

Dom Errico said...

I laughed out loud when Malkin couldn't come up with a single move on that penalty shot and yeah, Bombay popped into my head right away.

In regards to Fleury, I agree two may not have been his fault, but that means two of them might have been. The team needs him to elevate his game right now.

The two goals he gave up late versus Montreal cost the team at least a point if not two against a likely playoff contender.

It's early and they have a lot of time to turn it around but the early results aren't promising.

Mark Ericson said...

They need to repair the biggest fault i see--Losing faceoffs and not covering your man. Too many goals already because of a lack of effort. Awful.
Deryk Engelland has a HUGE right hand. I will stay away from that. By the way, where was Colton after that punch?
M E

Dom Errico said...

As they like to say on the street, Colton got knocked the #%#!&@% out.