Without much surprise, the Pittsburgh Penguins disposed of the Montreal Canadiens on Saturday by the score of 3-1. It was Pittsburgh’s second straight game limiting their opponents to just one goal, those two games also being the first in which the Penguins had prevented their opponents from scoring three goals in a game. Beating Anaheim and Montreal wouldn’t be much to celebrate for most teams, but Pittsburgh needed to win these games and save some face, and while the Ducks didn’t put up much of a fight, the Canadiens did. But both teams are pretty weak defensively, and that kind of opponent definitely helps these Penguins. Pittsburgh too has been a weak team defensively, but their offense has been very productive in terms of shot volume and quality, so as long as the puck luck is in their favor, they can feast on teams that are poor defensively (of which there have been many to start the season).

When the going gets tough, Sidney Crosby gets going, and he has been on fire in the last three games with four goals and three assists. He has somewhat quietly jumped into the team lead for points (tied with Evgeni Malkin) but also the League lead in game-winning goals. Like I said a few Gamedays ago, the problem for Sid was never going to be physical, it was going to be psychological. Until he had Evgeni Malkin on the top line with him, he was suffering with left-wingers who were very unlikely to keep up with him. It’s hard to be the only forward on your line who is going to reliably get anything done. Anthony Beauvillier, Drew O’Connor, they’re only top-six wingers on a good day. In fact I don’t know if the Penguins have any wingers who are worthy of that distinction right now. Rickard Rakell is streaky, Bryan Rust is injured and streaky when healthy, Michael Bunting is persona non grata in the fashion of Derick Brassard. So it’ll be interesting to see how things work out over the coming weeks as everyone gets healthy again, but it looks like head coach Mike Sullivan is content to load up the top line against teams that aren’t capable of doing much damage against the rest of the forwards.

So the Penguins have a modest two game winning streak heading on the road against some Metropolitan Division rivals, starting tonight with a visit to Long Island to face the New York Islanders. The Isles are off to a rough start themselves at 4-6-2, sitting one point behind Pittsburgh and Columbus at seventh in the division. What is typical about these Islanders is that they are not a strong team offensively: in fact they have scored the second-fewest goals in the NHL, just ahead of Anaheim in that regard, but they have been hampered by the worst shooting percentage in the League. They are doing as well as expected defensively (they have the NHL’s lowest expected goals against per 60 minutes in all situations), and their perennial Vezina candidate Ilya Sorokin has largely been doing his job, so the main issue has been getting the puck in their opponents’ nets.

Over the past few weeks the Blue and Orange have had a run of health problems to key contributors as Mathew Barzal suffered an upper-body injury that has him out until next month, same story for Adam Pelech, Mike Reilly and Alex Romanov are day-to-day, and Anthony Duclair is still at least a couple of weeks away from returning from his lower-body injury. All of this is going to challenge the Islanders and their mediocre depth, and for tonight it gives the Penguins an opportunity to push back against a team that has been annoying for them over the past several years.

Good luck getting distracted by this thrilling contest for at least a couple hours tonight!