Stars 5, Penguins 2: Pens Play Flawlessly. End Of Story.

When Brent Johnson let in a wrister from 40 feet then Brad Richards threw in a second goal after parking himself in the right circle uncovered for an hour and a half both within the first eight minutes of the First Period, I’m pretty sure we all had the same thought running through our heads: This is going to turn out to be the most perfect game the Penguins have ever played. And you know something? We were right.

The Penguins were completely flawless against Dallas in every conceivable way, and were extremely entertaining to watch in the process. The defense? Perfect. Johnson? Perfect. Michalek in his return from injury? Perfect and perfectly healthy. The power play? Is there a word more perfect than “perfect”? Like, “doubleplusperfect”? Because that’s how good the power play was.

Sure, the scoreboard at the end of the day said Dallas 5, Pittsburgh 2, and the only life the Pens showed was a string of random fights in the middle of the second including Sidney Crosby getting into the action, Kris Letang dropping his gloves, remembering his hand is injured, and pathetically clinging to Brenden Morrow, and Mike Comrie making himself useful and sticking up for his teammates by punching the puck. Shockingly, none of these actions sparked a four-goal comeback.

Hopefully the Pens can continue this flawless play in Anaheim on Friday night. The way the power play has been looking lately, in addition to the defense and the incredibly indistinguishable play of Comrie, Mike Rupp, Max Talbot, and Chris Kunitz, I’m moderately confident that they can keep it up.

2 Quick Sidenotes, after the jump:

Penguins 3, Hurricanes 0: I Think We All Saw This Brent Johnson Season Coming

This was one of those “simple analysis” type games, which is good, because I never feel like writing long posts on the weekend. I prefer spending the weekend relaxing by the beach, re-enacting Corona commercials by, like, pouring a mai tai on my cell phone, or whatever. I literally do that every single weekend. I’ve gone through hundreds of cell phones, but it’s totally worth…nah it’s not worth it. I really should stop ruining my cell phones with mai tais every weekend to prove how relaxed I am.

Whoops, I’m already rambling and making the short post long. The simple analysis:

1) The Penguins showed a lot of jump, particularly for a road game the night after a home game (though the ratio of Pens fans to Canes fans sounded downright Yankees-in-Tampaesque).

2) Brent Johnson played awesomely, and Cam Ward played not awesomely.

Johnson stopped 33 Carolina shots to notch his first shutout in a Penguin uniform, improving to 5-0-1 on the year. Ward, conversely, let in a Max Talbot goal after Talbot attempted to make a forehand move, lost the puck, and it slid in under Ward, then allowed a second goal to Pascal Dupuis on an unscreened, untipped wrister from the right circle.

The Johnson / Fleury disparity this season has been so glaring, it doesn’t require in-depth statistical analysis, but right now the numbers are just staggering:

Johnson: 5-0-1, 1.16 GAA, .960 SV%
Fleury: 1-5-0, 3.35 GAA, .863 SV%

At what point do we stop just automatically assuming Fleury will reclaim the starting job? That’s not a smart-assed rhetorical question, I honestly have no idea how this situation is going to play out over the next couple months. Brent Johnson has allowed 7 goals in six games – Bylsma has to keep starting him over Fleury for the foreseeable future, using Fleury only on their upcoming Friday/Saturday back-to-backs in the next two weeks, if at all. 12 games is a small sample size, and obviously we can’t throw Fleury under the bus after 6 games (and a bunch of bad games last year including several playoff ones ok I’ll stop this parenthesis has made its point). But Johnson’s certainly making it interesting.

By the way, that two-year, $600,000 / yr deal the Pens gave Johnson is looking slightly decent now, huh?

Blues 1, Penguins 0 (OT): Paul Martin Wears The Scarlet T

This was a fairly even game from both sides; the Blues absolutely dominated the Penguins in the first, outshooting them 7-3 with Brent Johnson turning aside the Blues’ multiple good chances, and the Pens responded by outshooting St. Louis 19-7 in the second, with Jaroslav Halak responding likewise. The game remained scoreless after a moderately wide-open third period, and the Blues finally cashed in in Overtime after Paul Martin committed a brutal turnover in the corner of the Pens’ defensive zone, which T.J. Oshie centered to a wide-open Erik Johnson for a game-ending wrister.

The turnover was unfortunate for Martin, who hadn’t played a particularly strong game to that point (he and Ben Lovejoy were the only Penguins who didn’t register a shot), but under most circumstances, the gaffe would’ve been merely one of several game elements we’d be discussing after a run-of-the-mill win or loss. In a 0-0 game, though, where both goalies were playing absolutely lights-out, Martin’s turnover directly gave the Blues their second point.

The game story would’ve been different if Halak had slipped up or if the Pens’ power play had managed a goal on their four opportunities or if the Blues had lost their legs in the third playing on back-to-back nights, but in the end, Martin had the puck cleanly on his stick, failed to make a play with it, and it ended up in the back of the Pens’ net. Pittsburgh still earned a point against a team that’s now won its last 10 home games, so the game wasn’t a total loss, but with the way Brent Johnson performed yet again, the Pens would’ve liked to have come away with two.

Fortunately for Montreal fans, Carey Price managed his first shutout in two years last night, so they didn’t have to see the Halak highlights and shoot themselves in the face while booing.

Penguins 5, Senators 2: Penguins Stick It To JUDAS Gonchar

Has a player ever left the Penguins on more amicable terms than Sergei Gonchar? He and the Penguins mutually agreed to part ways after five productive seasons and a Stanley Cup, then he signed with a conference nonrival for an excellent salary, and the Penguins welcomed him back with a highlight reel at Consol, a standing ovation from the fans, and Penguin players tapping their sticks on their boards. I was half expecting Matt Cooke to line Gonchar up for a blind-side hit, then at the last second yell “SURPRISE!” and flip lights on and the rest of the Penguins would all be gathered in the conference room with party hats and a “55″ cake and everyone would hug and Gonchar would give an awkward thirty second speech then they’d eat and slowly disperse back to work.

That didn’t exactly happen. What did happen, though, was a third straight Penguins victory, keyed off a 3-0 Penguin lead after a wide-open First Period. The Pens managed 17 shots in the First and allowed 12, but still emerged up three goals after a slick Mike Comrie feed to Mark Letestu for his team-leading fourth goal, a bubble hockey-esque bounce off the end boards that Crosby hand-eye-coordinated behind Brian Elliot, and a faceoff that Ottawa cleanly won in their own defensive zone that they couldn’t corral, ended up on net, and was knocked in on the rebound by a fully outstretched diving Malkin.

Penguins 5, Flyers 1: If You Give A Million Penguin Power Plays A Million Chances, They’ll Eventually Produce Hamlet

Before the season, I have to admit, I wasn’t totally enthused about the Pens’ re-signing of Brent Johnson, and not because I questioned Johnson’s ability as a backup or his performance in ’09-’10, but because I wanted the Penguins to go after a backup who could potentially get hot for a few games and challenge Fleury – perhaps someone in the Johan Hedberg / Martin Biron price-and-skill range — rather than a very clear backup goaltender, albeit a reliable and inexpensive one like Johnson. Now, six games into the 2010-11 season, Fleury has started three games and lost all three, and Johnson has started three and won all three. Obviously it’s super early and nothing Johnson does now (or probably ever) would or should unseat Fleury as the team’s long-term #1 goaltender, but for the meantime, Johnson is pushing Fleury for that starting job much in the way I’d hoped a Hedberg-type would have, and at the exceedingly reasonable cost of a two-year $600,000 cap hit (while also pulling the Penguins from 1-3 to 3-3).

It’s entirely possible Johnson will start letting in Scott Gomez dump-ins along the ice from 30 feet and this entire newfound confidence in his ability to challenge Fleury while helping the Penguins win in the short-term will immediately dissipate, but at least for the first six games, Johnson’s sudden steadiness couldn’t have come at a better time. Ideally, he can keep this up for a while and split the next 10 starts or so with Fleury 50/50, and after some confidence-redeeming Fleury spot-starts, Fleury can go back to being their 80/20 starter and playing like it. Or maybe he’ll keep letting in Scott Gomez dump-ins along the ice from 30 feet and I’ll have to keep copying and pasting my “Seriously, I’m not just whining, Fleury is factually not playing well” posts.

As for the Flyers game itself, the Pens got 700 power plays and finally scored on a few of them, the Flyers had trouble finishing and basically folded in the third, and after the game Mike Richards said a bunch of stuff that would’ve been interpreted as bitchy whining if Crosby had said it (gets going about a minute in):

Penguins 2, Flyers 1: No Such Thing As A Crappy Win (Except When It’s Really Crappy)

Yayyyyyy!!!! What a terrible way to win a terrible game!

How many crappy things happened in this game? Let us count the crapways:

Crappy Thing #1: Brent Johnson lets in another goal from 270 degrees behind the net. He plays fine after this, but still, it’d be nice if this stopped happening.

Crappy Thing #2: The Flyers get a goal waived off and a two-minute penalty assessed on a play where there never was an audible whistle. Only two possible explanations for this:

A) Simon Gagne grappling with Malkin didn’t become a penalty until the split-second in between the Flyers’ initial shot on goal and Mike Richards’ rebound, and the refs’ intent to whistle was established riiiiight before the puck went into the net.

B) Simon Gagne grappling with Malkin was a penalty before the Flyers’ initial shot on goal, but the ref just plum didn’t get around to blowin’ that dang whistle.

You can’t call this penalty a “two goal swing” even though the Pens scored on the resulting power play (if you get scored on by the Pens’ power play right now, it’s your own damn fault), but it was definitely a one-goal swing in that it literally took a goal off the board from the Flyers for something that NBC never totally explained. The Philly fans barely even booed (especially in comparison to the goalie interference penalty on Hartnell earlier in the period, which was also a bad call) because no one knew what the hell was going on.

Bunch more crappy crap to cover, so let’s move on:

Capitals 6, Penguins 3: Predictabull

I rarely get strong inclinations one way or the other before a Pens game about how it’s gonna turn out, but with the way the Pens’ D has been playing and with Brent Johnson in net against a red-hot Capitals offense, the outcome of this game was painfully foreseeable. I predicted 5-2 Capitals, and was actually surprised by the briefly-competitive 6-3 result.

The Pens’ D has been chuck-the-remote bad for a couple months now and continues to trivialize the Pens’ problems on the power play, in net, and Malkin’s mediocrity (all of which have at least shown signs of possible nearby improvement). If the Pens continue playing defense the way they have been, none of these other shortcomings will matter — the Pens will continue to be a glorified Lightning, incapable of stringing together a dominant win streak and entering the playoffs as eminently vulnerable. Fortunately, I don’t think this will be the case leading up to the playoffs, but for now, it’s a painful, me-swearing-at-the-screen reality.

I’ve been a Kris Letang supporter since long before the Ryan Whitney trade, but lately, Letang’s been my go-to Penguins scapegoat; he’s been directly responsible for about a goal a game over the past month, and not just as a result of him being out of position or failing to cover someone, but in increasingly creative, pathetic ways. Against the Capitals last night, Letang got caught pinching in the Caps’ zone below the goal line while it was 5-on-5 and a tie game, lost the puck, and left Nick Johnson — a winger playing in his first ever NHL game — back on D to cover Tomas Fleischmann, resulting in an instant Fleischmann breakaway and goal. Since any further comment on this action would result in at least a dozen F-words from me, I’ll just end the paragraph now.

Penguins 6, Bruins 5 (OT): Well, That Was Ridiculous

Not the best game for the Pens’ D, Brent Johnson or (for the first time ever) the power play, but nothing mattered — last night surpassed Jordan Staal vs. Detroit from last year as the most exciting Penguins regular season game since… I don’t know… something memorable Rico Fata probably did.

Not to be overlooked with Guerin’s game-tier or Dupuis’ bizarre winner were an insane deflection by Crosby, goals by Mark Eaton AND Jay McKee (on a Mike Rupp backhander), and…another goal by Pascal Dupuis.

Did this really happen?

Penguins Sign Backupgoalie McBackupgoalieson To One Year Deal

The Penguins signed ex-Capitals and Blues goaltender Brent Johnson to a one-year, $525,000 contract. It’s a one-way deal, so barring any injuries, Johnson will back up Marc-Andre Fleury when the season begins, allowing John Curry to start at Wilkes-Barre.

Johnson is coming off hip surgery but is still only 32, and has plenty of NHL experience over the past couple years; the Pens were rumored to be looking at Devils backup Kevin Weekes as well, but Weekes is three years older than Johnson and has played about negative two games in his last three NHL seasons, failing to even grab playing time when Martin Brodeur missed more than half the 2008-09 season.

The deal is a minimal commitment to someone who should be an upgrade over Dany Sabourin and Mathieu Garon, and fills out the Pens’ major-league roster with about $1.8 million in cap space left over for callups or mid-season finagling. After all, when you’ve got a franchise goalie locked in to a lengthy, expensive contract, it’d be pretty frickin’ stupid to blow $2.5 million a year on a veteran backup. I mean, who’d do something like that? It’d be a total admission of mismanagement. Or possibly a conspiracy by an ex-backup goalie turned general manager who’s obsessed with backup goalies. Either way, it’s not something I could ever see an actual NHL organization doing, cause it’d be a huge waste.