NEWARK, N.J. -- Of course it had to happen here.
For the better part of two decades, anytime the Penguins would perch a little too highly, anytime they'd get too fancy or finesse-happy, this was the place that would root them right back in reality. That's all it would take. One miserable evening in the Meadowlands, and they'd be reminded of how hard hockey is for all the rest.
Well, hello again, New Jersey!
Goals: Devils 3, Penguins 1.
Shots: Devils 38, Penguins 16.
Assessment: Big-time bitter.
"We didn't have it tonight. At all," Justin Schultz was telling me in a locker room where all concerned seemed to be racing for the exits. "We got outworked. They were the better team. That's a good team over there. They were ready, and I don't think we were."
Oh, that's nothing. Buckle up ...
"When you don't play committed, you don't play hard and you get outplayed, you're not going to win," Mike Sullivan fairly fumed against a wall outside the room. "I mean, we got outplayed. It's pretty simple. They wanted it more. They won every loose-puck battle. They were quicker with their second man to the puck battles."
He shook his head. And I'd swear his cheeks were pulsating at this point.
"For whatever reason, we didn't have any jump tonight. We didn't have our legs. We got outplayed."
Another pause.
"We deserved to lose."
Ow.
For whatever reason, indeed.
Not at all surprisingly, Sullivan didn't seek comfort in that 7-4 crushing of the Capitals less than 24 hours earlier back in Pittsburgh. Nor in that 10-3 surge that began with the turn of the calendar. Nor with all that offense oozing from all possible sources. Nor, most definitely, in the excuse his team was facing a more rested opponent.
That's over. That's been buried in 2017, at least as he clearly sees it.
"I said to our guys before this game that our challenge was to reinvest," Sullivan continued, snapping off all three syllables of that last word. "That was our challenge. We'd just come off an emotional game. But that's what this league's about: You've got to have a short memory. You've got to collect yourself. You've got to reinvest. And if you don't, you run the risk of getting beat. We played a hungry team tonight. They wanted to win more than we did."
Double-ow.
He's right, though. The goal remains the same as it was during those desperate days in December: Qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs. As uplifting as the surge has been, seeing the Penguins rise up to second in the Metro and within four points of the first-place Capitals with the win Friday, that team that beat them Saturday just leapfrogged them.
I asked the captain if maybe a reminder was in order:
2. Beware these guys.
The Devils aren't what they were, to be sure. They're strikingly young and supremely fast, unlike their dreadfully dull trapping predecessors. But they're also not what they were just last season, when they missed the playoffs by a mile and wound up with the No. 1 overall pick in the NHL Draft.
From the drop of the puck on this night, they pressed right into the Penguins' noses, forced turnovers and pile-drived poor Casey DeSmith's crease as if he'd been planted at the wrong end of a bowling alley:
The Devils scored the game's first two goals in the opening 3:05 of the second period kind of like that:
With half a minute elapsed, Blake Coleman outworked Kris Letang in the Pittsburgh left corner and flipped the puck out in front to Travis Zajac for a routine shove under DeSmith. Letang could have done a whole lot more with Coleman, but it didn’t help that Sidney Crosby joined in there to help. As any youth hockey coach preaches, if you've got one player out of position, then you go to help, how many are now out of position? To boot, Bryan Rust and Dominik Simon might as well have been 'Seinfeld' extras rooting on the Devils.
So bad. But at the same time, it was a credit to the home team's collective snarl, as was the second goal:
Olli Maatta’s clearing attempt up the right boards was stuffed by Stefan Noesen, and a give-and-go handed Coleman a casual stroll to the net from the right circle. He smoked it by DeSmith upstairs.
Asked about those two goals, Sullivan scowled again and doubled down.
"They're everything we thought they'd be," he said. "They're young. They've got energy. They're hungry. They're quick. We knew it was going to be a hard game, a north-south game, a speed game ... and we weren't prepared to play. We've all got to do a better job, myself included."
3. What's interference anymore?
I'm reluctant to even raise this, since I might suggest the Penguins had a chance to win this game ... but they actually did.
With 7:06 left in regulation, Rust rode through the New Jersey crease, with old friend Ben Lovejoy at shotgun. A stick, presumably Rust's, clipped Keith Kinkaid in the mask with enough force to knock him to the ice. Crosby, spotting this from a severe angle, collected the puck and unapologetically clanged it into the net off Kinkaid's head.
Hey, it's all fair. Ask Henrik Lundqvist.
Well, the officials soon huddled and decided it wasn't fair, waving off the goal for goaltender interference. The Penguins' bench, predictably, barked about this, and Sullivan decided to challenge. At first, I thought he was doing so to check if it had been Lovejoy's stick that had clipped Kinkaid. In which case it obviously couldn't have been interference.
But that wasn't it, as it turned out when I asked:
I find that stance far more fascinating. Sullivan's got a point: If every single contact with a goaltender is interference, regardless of the initiation of that contact, then this rule needs clarified almost as much as the NFL needs to figure out what constitutes a catch. In this case specifically, if Lovejoy is driving Rust toward the goaltender, it needs to be known which player is responsible.
That sequence, by the way, wiped away what would have been Crosby's 400th goal. He's played extremely well over the past month -- 22 points in the past 12 games -- but he's gone eight games without scoring himself.
He missed this one in the second period:
It's starting to feel like the long wait for the 1,000th point last winter, isn't it?
4. Double up on double-shifts!
John Hynes, the Devils' coach, has made headlines among the hockey fans in this part of the world for going with 11 forwards and seven defensemen for the express purpose of double-shifting Taylor Hall, by far his best player.
Hall's "a special player," as Ian Cole put it.
On this night, he logged a game-high 25:58 of ice time, registered four shots and finished with one assist, a beauty in which he backed off Brian Dumoulin to create space for New Jersey's final goal, Zajac's second:
"He can handle it," Hynes said of Hall's ice time. "He's a thoroughbred, and I think you saw that tonight."
The Penguins happen to have at least a couple of those, too, so it was nice to see Sullivan extend his recent trend of inserting Crosby and Evgeni Malkin -- alternating turns -- into the fourth line, this time between newly arrived Zach Aston-Reese and Ryan Reaves. At least he was doing that until New Jersey began pulling away, but that still counts.
Put it another way: How fresh has Malkin looked for weeks now?
That includes this self-made special that pulled the Penguins within 2-1 in the third:
It might sound risky for a team that's played a bazillion games the past three seasons, stretching their superstars too thin, but the final tally's always going to amount to a couple extra shifts a game. And if they get out there against the opponents' least gifted players, as they should in particular on the road because the home coach would covet that matchup, that's a little bit of extra ice with which they can create.
No long-term solution is here, obviously. But making the playoffs is the immediate issue. And if a third-line center can't be acquired until closer to the deadline, this seems decidedly more attractive than eight or nine minutes of Carter Rowney.
5. Feels right at home.
Aston-Reese wound up with one shot, no points and a minus-1, but every player gets only one NHL debut, and this one ... well, he was characteristically understated beforehand and afterward.
His first shift came on a power play, which has to be a league rarity even if it was with the second unit.
"I couldn't believe I was one of those guys," he'd say.
To boot, he nearly scored on it after a between-the-legs feed from Dominik Simon, though Kinkaid stood tall:
"Dom made a great pass. I've been thinking about what I should have done with it when I got back to the bench," Aston-Reese said, allowing a small smile. "It went OK. It was exciting to be out there."
Yeah, right. He's 23, he wasn't exactly raised in a hockey hotbed on nearby Staten Island, wasn't selected in the NHL Draft, and wasn't taken terribly seriously at Northeastern University, even as a Hobey Baker finalist. And yet, here he was, with his family needing to make only a 20-minute drive to take him up on the tickets he'd secured earlier in the day.
It's a fine story, but it's one that can become so much better. Aston-Reese's skating still riles up the skeptics in the hockey world, and maybe it should. But his no-nonsense, bulldozing style has already done away with doubters, and his past month in Wilkes-Barre -- 15 points in his final 14 games there -- earned him serious praise from Clark Donatelli in the ear of Sullivan.
The coach's review was firm when it was done, too.
"I thought he was strong," Sullivan said. "He played in a straight line."
Aston-Reese's path forward might still have a few curves. We'll see how he fares in this stint and, more pertinent, how Patric Hornqvist heals. But the kid got a crash course Saturday -- silently waiting his turn at the skate-sharpening machine behind Crosby, Malkin and pretty much anyone else who passed by, then being whisked off to a room for a special session with Mark Recchi, then the game itself -- in what it means to be in the NHL. That's a start.
If nothing else, looking across the ice on this night could inspire all concerned that youth doesn't always need to wait.
