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Penguins lose opportunity to bury Blue Jackets

March 10, 2019, 2:03 PM ET [227 Comments]
Ryan Wilson
Pittsburgh Penguins Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
It wasn’t very likely the Blue Jackets were going to lay down and let the Penguins rip away their playoff hopes at home on a Saturday night. Columbus earned a 4-1 victory and maintaining a positive outlook for making the postseason.

Here’s how the game went




Pittsburgh moved Dominik Simon to the top line. With Bryan Rust out for a while Mike Sullivan is trying to find something that sticks. Simon is a lot like Conor Sheary in the sense that he can play there, but the results are not going to be consistent. I don’t really have a problem with giving him a look. He’s a 1.81 points per 60 player at 5v5 which is really good value for what the Penguins are paying him. Dominik Simon’s 21 5v5 points has him tied with Patric Hornqvist. The fact of the matter is Hornqvist hasn’t been good enough since he returned from injury on January 19th. In the past 21 games Hornqvist has only two points (both assists) at 5v5. He only has three points on the power play in that sample so you can’t even say he’s a power play specialist at the moment. The team has to get more out of Hornqvist’s 5.3M with Rust out of the lineup. This was the part of the contract extension that was supposed to look good.

Matt Murray had to work really hard for his .906 save percentage last night. He sprinkled in one of the best saves of his career in the losing effort




It was Sergei Bobrovsky’s night. After weirdly finding himself up in the stands the last meeting he was the starter and turned away 28 out of the 29 shots the Penguins took. A really solid performance given the pressure he was under making this start.

Pittsburgh doesn’t to think about this loss for long. They face the Bruins in a few hours. This three game stretch of Columbus, Columbus, and Boston is a good example of why the Penguins have the hardest strength of schedule left in the entire league. Penguins are still in decent shape, especially with Montreal taking losses in three of their last four games.

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