CHICAGO — Before the Penguins faced off against the Blackhawks, Mike Sullivan said his primary goal when assessing the team at this early stage of the season is just making sure they're getting better on a daily basis.
That should be pretty easy moving forward. On Thursday night, the Penguins didn’t look like they could get any worse.
They gave up five unanswered first-period goals en route to a 10-1 loss in Chicago that was every bit as ugly and uncompetitive as the scoreline indicates.
When asked where things went wrong, Sidney Crosby struggled to come up with just one answer.
“It’s a 10-1 game,” he said. “Do we have enough time? It’s embarrassing.”
All of the seemingly minor problems that popped up in the Penguins’ season-opening 5-4 overtime loss to St. Louis Wednesday seemed to get worse against the Blackhawks.
Defensemen struggled to keep track of their men, both on the rush and in the defensive zone. Forwards turned the puck over, leading to odd-man rushes the other way.
Defenseman Kris Letang, though, pointed to a problem beyond any zone breakdowns or strategic lapses.
“Tonight, there was no effort, no emotion in the game,” Letang said.
Sullivan agreed.
“The effort wasn’t there, the execution wasn’t there,” he said. “It appears to me like we want the game easy, we don’t want to have to play the right way."
The numbers obviously weren’t pretty for the Penguins’ goalies, but Sullivan said it’s impossible to fairly evaluate them in a game as lopsided as this one.
Antti Niemi, making his Penguins debut in the city where he won a Stanley Cup in 2010, looked shaky at best, giving up four goals in the first 9:16 before being pulled in favor of Matt Murray.
Even once Murray replaced Niemi midway through the first, though, the Chicago onslaught didn’t stop.
“I feel bad for them,” Letang said. “I don’t know what to say. I’ll say I’m sorry for these guys, because they don’t deserve that. They’re two guys that battled really hard. It’s not the way to start Antti in his first game with his new team. I think we owe him a big one.”
Thirteen different Blackhawks recorded points, with six different players scoring goals.
Pine native Brandon Saad, playing his first game back with the Blackhawks after two years in Columbus, scored a hat trick in his return to the United Center.
Patrick Kane and Ryan Hartman had five apiece, including the opening goal which featured a beautiful behind-the-back pass from Kane to Hartman.
That goal was a sign of things to come, too. Kane flashed some tremendous skill on the assist, but the Penguins didn’t do themselves any favors with their inability to clear the puck or keep Hartman away from the net.
“We know we have to be a lot better, effort-wise,” Letang said. “The execution wasn’t there tonight and it led to a lot of odd-man rushes and a team like that will make you pay.”
The loss marked the first time the Penguins have given up 10 goals since Jan. 13, 1996, in a 10-8 loss to San Jose. It was their worst margin of defeat since a 9-0 loss to Tampa Bay on Nov. 8, 2003.
“It’s a tough lesson, but we’ve got to take something from it and hopefully this is something that’s a wake-up call for us,” Crosby said.
The Penguins will have one day to think about this loss — probably one more day than they would like — before returning to action Saturday against Nashville in a Stanley Cup final rematch, which should provide memories of rosier times.
The schedule doesn’t get much kinder after that, though, with three more sets of back-to-back games in October seven of the next 11 on the road.
The Penguins have 80 more games to prove that this was just an aberration, a one-off dismal performance in a tricky situation that snowballed out of control. Eighty more games and nowhere to go but up.
“It’s early, but it’s disturbing,” Sullivan said. “When you lose a game like that, it’s disturbing. I don’t care when it is in the season. We’ve got to do some soul-searching, and right now we are just simply not playing the game the right way."
Sam Werner: swerner@post-gazette.com and Twitter @SWernerPG
First Published: October 6, 2017, 3:28 a.m.