The Penguins left Utah with another loss and another reminder that a comeback is not the same as a complete game. The Mammoth beat Pittsburgh 5-4 on Saturday, sending the Penguins home from a four-game road trip without a win and dropping them to 1-6-1 after opening the season with two victories.
Sidney Crosby said the problem was simple: the Penguins never put all of it together. They scored first, got goals from Erik Karlsson and Rickard Rakell, and still spent long stretches chasing the game after the Mammoth controlled much of the play. Crosby said the group had leads and fought back, but still could not manage a full game.
The loss mattered because it fit the pattern that has defined the Penguins' start. They can score in bursts. They can respond when the game gets away from them. They still have not played well enough over 60 minutes to turn those pieces into points. A power play that had been 0-for-20 before scoring against the Golden Knights has now gone 3-for-3 since then, so the offense is finding moments. The larger issue is whether the Penguins can stop giving those moments back at the other end.
That was the friction in Utah. The Mammoth took a 2-1 lead into the intermission, then made it 3-2 after Arturs Silovs was screened on Nate Schmidt's shot. They stretched it to 4-2 on a re-direct and scored again on the next power play early in the third period. Pittsburgh answered late, with Egor Chinakhov and Declan Carlile cutting the margin to one and Ben Kindel nearly tying it when Karlsson's shot hit him and the puck slipped through Sebastian Cossa before striking the post. The comeback was real. So was the gap that opened before it.
Muse said the Penguins need to be tighter and harder to play against, and that is the clearest next step. Crosby added that they were getting sustained shifts in their own zone and not getting enough of a forecheck back, which is why the game kept tilting away from them. The Penguins fly to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, practice Wednesday and host Florida on Thursday. By then, they will need more than urgency at the end. They will need the kind of structure that keeps a game from slipping away long before the final push.
