The Penguins and Senators are not natural rivals.
They don't play in the same division and haven't met in the Stanley Cup playoffs since 2017. (Chris Kunitz in double-overtime, anyone?)
And, based on Ottawa's current trajectory, they probably won't collide there again anytime soon.
The Senators are in the midst of a rebuilding program and are marooned behind 25 other clubs (and tied with two others) in the overall standings. Mathematical elimination from playoff contention should come any minute now.
If they were any closer to being bottom-feeders, algae would be served at their team meals.
Which doesn't begin to explain why, for most of the Penguins' 5-2 victory at PPG Paints Arena Monday night, they co-existed with the Senators like a mongoose and cobra that had been forced to share a shoebox.
Hostilities commenced on the earliest shifts of the game and continued until just 19.6 seconds were left in regulation, when there was one final skirmish that yielded 36 penalty minutes.
"They're trying to utilize that tactic to neutralize some of our top guys," Mike Sullivan said. "But I thought our guys did a pretty good job of playing through."
Evgeni Malkin, who put the Penguins in front to stay 27 seconds after the opening faceoff, was a favorite target, from the time Thomas Chabot drove a cross-check into his lower back at 7:16 of the opening period, triggering a scuffle that included Malkin delivering a punch to the back of Ottawa winger Scott Sabourin's neck, to when Brady Tkachuk came off the bench with about a half-minute to go in regulation to take a final run at him.
On at least one level, going after Malkin made sense for Ottawa, since he finished the evening with two goals and an assist and was the dominant force in the game.
But in reality, it was counter-productive, because Malkin responded to the abuse by elevating his game and actually seemed to thrive amidst the nastiness.
"I liked this game," he said. "It's like, close to playoffs. ... I like to play physical."
But while Malkin escaped largely unscathed, Jake Guentzel -- who had been named the Penguins' representative to the All-Star Game just hours earlier -- wasn't so fortunate.
A split-second after he backhanded a shot into a largely open net at 6:55 of the third period to close out the scoring, Chabot tripped him, sending Guentzel hurtling into the boards:
Had he hit them any harder, Guentzel might have burst into flames.
He appeared to injure his right arm/wrist/shoulder and went directly to the locker room.
Sullivan said after the game that Guentzel still was being evaluated and that he did not have any information about his status.
He also absolved Chabot of culpability for Guentzel's injury, saying that the trip "appeared to be ... incidental contact."
There was no penalty assessed on the play, and the Senators actually received just one minor before the late-game unpleasantries, the latter of which produced the Penguins' only 20 seconds with the man-advantage all evening.
"I think the referee should maybe have given us a power play like, one time," Malkin said. "But it's fine."
The Penguins' didn't need anything from their power play mostly because Malkin and his linemates, Guentzel and Bryan Rust, were so productive, accounting for three goals and five assists.
"Our line played unbelievable," Malkin said. "Not just myself. Rust and (Guentzel), they help me so much."
True enough, but Malkin -- as usual -- has done some of his best work while Sidney Crosby has been out of the lineup. Although the Penguins' success this season despite dealing with a ridiculous number of man-games lost by key personnel truly has taken a team effort, Malkin's role in their 14-5-3 record while Crosby has been recovering from surgery to repair a sports hernia should not be underestimated.
"He's just been a horse for us," Sullivan said. "He's coming to play every night. You can see the threat he is when he's at the top of his game, and he's been that way.
"He's so dominant with the puck. He's big and strong. He's tough to contain. And he's playing at both ends of the rink, on both sides of the puck. That's why we've been able to find some of the wins that we've gotten here over the last month or so."
The kind of resiliency they demonstrated after each of Nick Paul's goals for the Senators has played a big part in that, too.
Just 101 seconds after he cut the Penguins' lead to 2-1 early in the second period, Malkin restored their two-goal advantage. And when Paul made it 3-2 at 15:58 of the second, Patric Hornqvist countered 53 seconds later:
"It's huge when we can play with the lead, and it's huge when we can keep the lead," Tristan Jarry said. "It keeps our momentum and it keeps the game flowing for us."
Nothing, it seemed, was going to disrupt the Penguins' momentum for long on this night. Perhaps because nothing they experienced -- or, in some cases, absorbed -- caught them unprepared.
"We expected a tough game," John Marino said. "They're a team that battles. I think we answered that pretty well."
• The Penguins probably wish Ottawa would stop by a little more often. They have won their past eight home games against the Senators and are 10-0-1 in the past 11 against them here.
• Malkin's goal 27 seconds into the game, coupled with one Rust got 32 seconds into their 6-4 victory against Nashville last Saturday, means the Penguins have scored in the first minute of consecutive games for the first time since Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1999.
• Dominik Simon scored his second goal in three games, matching his output from the previous 36:
• The Penguins made one lineup change from last weekend, putting Joseph Blandisi in Sam Lafferty's spot between Simon and Hornqvist. Blandisi played nine minutes, 12 seconds and recorded an assist and two hits. Blandisi bled after taking a seemingly inadvertent stick to the face from Ottawa defenseman Cody Goloubef in the first period, but did not miss a shift.
• Ottawa fared a lot better on the stat sheet than on the scoreboard. The Senators went 35-29 on faceoffs and ran up a 55-34 advantage in hits.
THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
THE INJURIES
• Nick Bjugstad (core muscle surgery)
• Sidney Crosby (sports hernia surgery)
• Brian Dumoulin (ankle surgery)
• Justin Schultz (unspecified lower-body)
THE LINEUPS
Sullivan’s lines and pairings:
Jake Guentzel -- Evgeni Malkin -- Bryan Rust
Dominik Kahun -- Jared McCann -- Alex Galchenyuk
Dominik Simon -- Joseph Blandisi -- Patric Hornqvist
Zach Aston-Reese -- Teddy Blueger -- Brandon Tanev
Jack Johnson -- Kris Letang
Marcus Pettersson -- John Marino
Juuso Riikola -- Chad Ruhwedel
And for D.J. Smith's Senators:
Brady Tkachuk -- Jean-Gabriel Pageau -- Connor Brown
Nick Paul -- Chris Tierney -- Anthony Duclair
Tyler Ennis -- Artem Anisimov -- Colin White
Vladislav Namestnikov -- J.C. Beaudin -- Scott Sabourin
Thomas Chabot -- Cody Goloubef
Mark Borowiecki -- Erik Brannstrom
Andreas Englund -- Christian Jaros
THE SCHEDULE
The Penguins are scheduled to practice at noon in Cranberry in advance of their first game of 2020, Thursday against San Jose at 7:08 p.m. at PPG Paints Arena.
THE COVERAGE
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MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
