Penguins Postgame: The Big Issues, Erik Karlsson, & Differences

The Pittsburgh Penguins won a game. Yes, they needed a four-goal cushion to hang on against the Vancouver Canucks, but there were significant differences between the Penguins’ performance on Wednesday and the downtrodden affairs of the past couple of weeks. Pittsburgh Hockey Now’s Dan Kingerski got into the significant differences, as well as a few of the important performances.

But he also laid out the importance of the next few days as the Penguins practice Thursday and play in Boston on Friday before returning home to host Calgary on Saturday. Lose the next couple of games, and Wednesday’s confidence boost will be for naught.

Coach Mike Sullivan used the two days of practice leading up to the game to make a few “tweaks” to the system and was not shy about scratching several veteran players, though rookie Owen Pickering was unable to play due to illness.

“We felt like we had two productive days. It’s not that we changed a whole lot, but we made some tweaks to our respective game in different zones,” Sullivan said. “We tried to simplify it a little bit so we could take some of the thinking out of it and hopefully get our guys playing on their toes a little bit more and a little bit more of an instinctive mode.”

The Penguins finally snapped their skid.