You can’t make everybody happy all of the time

Not really the Staal we wanted to see celebrating..

Well, we talked about secondary scoring but we didn't even mention our boy Brooks Orpik's 180 game goal drought, because that wouldn't seem right. The hooks man put one home and, to the surprise of no one, Evgeni Malkin added a powerplay goal but the Pens ended up blowing a 2-1 lead.

• Can't blame Dany Sabourin. In what likely was his last start of the year for Pittsburgh he made 42 saves and stopped the ones he should have, just didn't have the team in front of him.
• Kris Beech wasn't bad but wasn't good and took a hard spill into the boards right on his arm. If he doesn't have a broken or dislocated wrist it would shock us.
• Jordan Staal was listed on nhl.com as a -3 and took 3 penalties. Plus he won just 24% of his faceoffs. Not a good night for little brother.
• The Penguins only had 22 shots. They took another 22 shots that got blocked down by Carolina.
• Ray Whitney, as we identified as being -11 in the past month, feasted on the powerplay. He had an even +/- rating but had 1 goal and 2 assists on the powerplay.
• Rob Scuderi's patented "take a knee and stick your stick out" cost the Penguins a goal against. Scuds has morphed into a decent NHL defenseman but someone ought to tell him to act like a defenseman and not a goaltender at times.
• In his first game back, Tyler Kennedy did more than just bring his usual energy. He had exactly 13 minutes of icetime and provided 2 shots on goal (with 2 more blocked), was credited with 3 take-aways, 1 hit and a blocked shot of his own. If he can continue that kind of effort one gets a feeling the Pens can feed off of that in nights to come.
• Two Canes had a negative +/- and no Pens did. That tells you that Carolina's powerplay did their job and Pittsburgh's did not.

Unfortunately the Pens let one loss become two tonight. But Philadelphia, the only other Atlantic team in the mix, lost too, so the boys didn't lose that much ground.

Pittsburgh has a rare Friday and Saturday off and get to return home for a practice until Sunday on the road against a scrappy Buffalo team. Beech's apparent nasty spill must mean that Erik Christensen can get back into the lineup and the team will have enough time to regroup and hopefully get their legs under them again.