Chalkboard: Ridiculous Penguins Breakdowns

Pittsburgh Penguins coach Mike Sullivan challenged the very heart of his team through gritted teeth and seething anger expressed in deliberate syllables on Tuesday after yet another loss snatched from victory. After an eighth collapse in 21 games, there isn’t a singular theme that the team or coaches can address.

The Penguins have self-destructed by a variety of means, and a variety of players have worn the blame.

However, Sullivan upped the ante by demanding his team begin to take pride in playing defense. He’s correct. After witnessing 21 games, the team surely doesn’t. There are a variety of factors, from Erik Karlsson’s defensive shortcomings to Matt Grzelcyk’s bad habit of puck-watching to the myriad of forwards who select the worst times to make the biggest mistakes, such as Noel Accairi getting beat to the net by Brandon Hagel Tuesday night.

Goal No.2: How does this goal happen with a lead in crunch time? Sullivan seemed to lay some blame on goalie Tristan Jarry for the goal, but the defensive efforts were just plain bad.

Where to begin with that many mistakes. First, Erik Karlsson allows Cirelli to go for a free skate. He doesn’t confront, engage, or even slow Cirelli. Karlsson goes below the goal line to defend but neither contacts the puck carrier nor the puck. Compounding the errors, he is lethargic in regaining his position near the net.

Given a redo, perhaps Marcus Pettersson would play it differently, too, but it happened so quickly that he reacted to both the Cirelli threat and the Brandon Hagel threat behind him by going down (awkwardly).

Without Karlsson in position and a puck carrier at full speed, Hagel beat Noel Acciari to the net. Karlsson in position would have nullified this threat, too.

While Jarry deflected the pass into the net, he had to be mindful of a wide-open net crasher in front of him. That’s not protecting the house in crucial moments.

Goal No. 1: So, so … so many questions and problems.

Bad line change.
No one spots Brayden Point. Should Pettersson have stayed and done with him?
Crosby doesn’t spot Point either and goes forward as the F3, not backward
Matt Grzelcyk wasn’t fast enough to confront Point and appeared to take a bad angle and get beat by the hesitation fake.
Should Owen Pickering have left his man to confront Point at the post?
Why did coaches send TWO left-handed defensemen out–who was the right-side defenseman? Where was Jack St. Ivany?
Should Grzelcyk have stayed with Point skating behind the net rather than peeling off to skate across the crease to re-engage? Did he call for help?
Should Mike Sullivan have thrown every stick on the bench?

We paused it at the moment of no return so you could get a good look at how preventable the goal truly was.

And here’s the goal in video. Grzelcyk’s defense looks worse on video than the floating numbers above. It was such a microcosm of the Penguins’ game; entirely preventable, mistake-filled, and destructive.

The Penguins’ self-destruction continued Tuesday with no end in sight. It’s happened against good teams and bad. The locker room was somber, if not crushed after the game. They knew they had it, and they blew it … again.