Blomqvist's 46 saves not enough to make up for continued collapses

EDMONTON, Alberta -- Joel Blomqvist put together the best performance by any Penguins goaltender this season.

He piled up 46 saves, including 19 in the first period alone. He repeatedly made incredibly difficult saves look routine, robbed the likes of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, bailed out the skaters on odd-man rushes against, and made easy work of flurries of shots in quick succession as his teammates couldn't clear the net-front. 

It wasn't enough, and the Penguins fell to the Oilers, 4-0, Friday night at Rogers Place. It couldn't have been enough, given the team's continued abysmal defense, or the disappearing act put forth by a lot of the forwards in this one. Yeah, goaltending has been a problem at times but, even when it's been elite, it doesn't come close to making this team competitive with the NHL's top teams, never mind one of the two most recent Stanley Cup finalists.

At this point, slow starts within a game don't come as a surprise. Even so, in this one, the Penguins were outshot, 19-5, through 20 minutes and went the final 10:13 of that span without a shot on goal. 

I asked Sidney Crosby afterward why he through the period ended up as lopsided as it did.

"I'm not sure," he replied. "They're opportunistic, and they've got speed. We just weren't tight enough. They had too much room."

Thanks to Blomqvist, the game remained scoreless. He gave them the opportunity to erase that disastrous first period and come out with a clean slate in the second period  ... which the Penguins did nothing with. It took them nearly eight minutes into the middle frame to even record a shot on goal. Draisaitl opened the scoring at the 13-minute mark in the second, flying up the right side of the ice and finally beating Blomqvist by blistering one in off the far post:

Hardly a goal one could pin on Blomqvist, but he still expressed regret, saying, "I left the far post a little bit too open there. But you just need to learn from each thing that happens out there."

Evan Bouchard doubled the lead later in the period with a goal the Penguins claimed was offside, but failed in their challenge. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins made it a 3-0 game 16 seconds into the third period with a goal that was such a mess on the Penguins' end it's difficult to even find a place to begin:

A Mattias Ekholm power-play goal seven minutes into the third was the last shot to beat Blomqvist. 

Allowing 50 shots is a new high -- a new low, really -- for the Penguins this season. In chronological order in their first seven games of the season, the Penguins have allowed 40 (Rangers), 32 (Red Wings), 33 (Maple Leafs), 28 (Canadiens), 33 (Sabres), 38 (Hurricanes) and 37 (Jets) shots. Tuesday in Calgary, the Penguins appeared to start heading in the right direction by allowing only 25 in that loss, but then they made sure to show that was a fluke.

"It's concerning," Mike Sullivan said. "Because we're not good enough right now. We didn't play hard enough. We didn't play together as a group. We weren't good enough."

What's more concerning is that nobody seems to have any real answers. Yeah, everyone can identify that the overall team defense (no, not just the defensemen themselves) is an issue. 'Not playing together.' 'Not playing tight enough.' It's all been said repeatedly. But nobody offers explanations or possible solutions.

"I don't know," Crosby told me when I asked why it's still an issue. "I think we've got to hold onto pucks a little more. A team like that, they're going to make you pay for turnovers, and they had a lot of odd-man rushes. We've got to find a way to hold onto it."

Bryan Rust was direct about the lack of answers, saying, "If we had answers, we wouldn't have done it."

Sullivan stressed that the issues are a team-wide, "collective effort" issue. 

"It's team defense," he said. "You know, we didn't have the puck enough. We've got to hang onto the pucks. We've got to make plays when they're there. We've got to hang onto pucks in the offensive zone. We just didn't have the puck enough."

Here's a stat that really illustrates how bad the problems have been: If you take every game played this season by every team, and rank the single-game totals of high-danger shots on goal allowed by teams ... the Penguins hold of four of the top-10 spots: Opening night against the Rangers (18 high-danger shots allowed), Oct. 18 against the Hurricanes (17 allowed), Oct. 20 against the Jets (15 allowed), and this one (15 allowed). So it's not just quantity. It's about giving up Grade As, too.

They've got to figure it out fast. This game showed that Blomqvist can handle the NHL. But if this team is going nowhere, it might not be best for Blomqvist long-term to face a figurative firing squad every night at this level. That's not what a rookie goaltender's confidence needs.

The lone bright spot in this otherwise abysmal loss is that Blomqvist showed that, if the Penguins are going to turn this season around, he could be one of the three goaltenders who deserves to stick around. And that's based not just off this game, but his five to date. 

All three of Blomqvist, Tristan Jarry and Alex Nedeljkovic have played behind a bad defensive team this season. Blomqvist has unequivocally handled it the best, and that's measurable. The stat GSAx (goals saved above expected) is the one goaltending metric that aims to account for things like a bad defensive team by measuring how a goaltender performs relative to his workload in terms of quantity and quality of chances against. A goaltender on a bad team is going to have a lot of expected goals against, and a goaltender behind a good team is going to have fewer expected goals against. GSAx measures how a goaltender actually performs against those expected results. Using Natural Stat Trick's expected goals model, Jarry's GSAx is minus-3.49. Nedeljkovic's is better, and nearly even, at minus-1.1. Blomqvist's is actually in the positives, at 1.68. Again, that isn't a byproduct of the team defense in front of them, this accounts for that. Though it's relatively low sample sizes for all three, Jarry has actually been bad. Nedeljkovic has slightly underperformed. Blomqvist has exceeded expectations and made up for the poor showings in front of him.

"He made some great saves," Crosby told me of Blomqvist. "In that first period, he was seeing a lot of pucks, and he did a great job."

Blomqvist said Friday that it's a "goal always" to be the goalie that's "getting the most opportunities," i.e., the No. 1. He could very well acheive that this season. But it might not make a difference if the rest isn't addressed.