Ryan Graves played his first game since Nov. 23 after an extended stretch as a healthy scratch and had a quiet but sound showing: Skating on the third pairing with Matt Grzelcyk, he logged 14:01, a team-low among defensemen, including 2:04 on the penalty-kill, and saw good results at five-on-five, with the Penguins controlling 55.56% of shot attempts (15-12).

"I thought it was good," Graves told me. "Trying to get into it again is tough. ln the past, aside from my first few years, the only breaks you have like that are All-Star breaks, things like that, where everyone's kind of in the same boat. So to get back into it, you're trying to keep it ultra-simple, and you're just trying to get a feel for it again. So my fitness felt good. That wasn't an issue. You just want to get back into the timing and the confidence aspects."

A few moments stood out -- a blocked shot from the bottom of the left circle in the first period, a sliding defensive play to break up a Toronto rush in the second, and a hustling backcheck to beat out Alex Nylander for a puck in the third when the game was tied.

"Graves, I thought he was solid," Mike Sullivan said. "I thought he played the game we're asking him to play. I thought he was hard at our net-front. He was good on the penalty-kill. He defended hard, used his stick, used his size to lean on people. He had the one blocked shot, he recovered really well from it. I thought he was competing hard out there. I thought he had a solid night."

Graves might have been the happiest I've seen him all season after the win.

"It's something that's very tough. We're all competitive," he said. "Your first priority is you want the team to win. So that's obviously a bonus that we were winning. It's worse when you're sitting up there and you're losing, but you feel like you can help the team, and you feel like you have something to offer."