CALGARY, Alberta — Tristan Jarry came ready to play. His teammates did not.
The Penguins’ 2-1 shootout loss Monday at Scotiabank Saddledome was perhaps their poorest performance of the season. The Calgary Flames flustered them with their forecheck, doubled them up in zone time and fired a dozen more shots from the slot. The visitors had nearly as many turnovers as they had shots.
If not for Jarry, who made 31 saves, they could have lost 6-1. They were that bad and he was that good. And yet, improbably, they escaped with a point.
Just how great was the disparity in performance between Jarry, the NHL’s hottest goalie, and the guys in front of him? We’ll let Penguins players explain.
“We didn’t like our game,” Jake Guentzel said. “Tristan played unbelievable.”
“Jarry played great for us and we were kind of lucky to get away with a point,” said Marcus Pettersson. “He kept it close the whole game. I don’t think we had close to our best all night. So, yeah, overall we’re disappointed with our effort.”
“I mean, he’s the reason we got the point tonight, for sure,” Jeff Carter said.
The Flames peppered the goalie throughout the first period. The home team had a 4-on-1 rush early on. Those are about as common as a Kasperi Kapanen haircut, but Jarry kept the puck out. Moments later, he smothered Johnny Gaudreau’s tap-in try. He then sprawled over to get his glove on Elias Lindholm’s shot.
Seven of his 10 saves in the first were on shots from the slot, per Sportlogiq.
The Penguins, on the other hand, didn’t muster much offensively in the opening period. For much of it, they had more icing infractions than shots on goal.
Calgary’s five-man forecheck posed them problems. Flames forwards hustled in then stuck to the boards, forcing several careless passes into the middle.
“They’ve got a good team. They work their [butts] off and they were on top of us the whole game,” Pettersson said. “We couldn’t get our speed going [and play] the way we want to play. So it was tough to make tape-to-tape passes.”
The Flames kept coming in the second period. Jarry made a few more big saves and Gaudreau rang the right post before they finally beat him midway through.
In the neutral zone, Milan Lucic banked the puck off the boards then spun around Chad Ruhwedel, one of the many puck battles the Flames won Monday.
As Lucic skated down the left wing with the grace and beauty of an angry moose stumbling down a snowy hillside, excited Flames fans yelled “Loooooooch!” Then the big lug let a shot go from the left circle that got through Jarry’s pads.
That scoring play was one of several rush chances for the Flames. But they were otherwise content to chip and chase and put the heat back on the Penguins.
“We just didn’t handle their pressure,” said Sullivan, who was clearly miffed. “We didn’t put pressure on them. We didn’t have our best game. When we do, we do a better job putting teams under pressure, controlling territory and hanging onto pucks. I just don’t think that as a team we were very good tonight.”
A briefly promising play early in the third period summed up their night. The middle of the Calgary defense opened up for Danton Heinen, one of their leading scorers. But he tripped over the blue line and flailed at the puck as he helplessly slid across the fresh sheet of ice. The Flames scooped up the puck and were off.
Pittsburgh hardly tested Jakob Markstrom, who faced 21 shots in regulation.
“We just didn’t have any juice. We couldn’t get going. We couldn’t get up on pucks and forecheck,” Carter said. “It just seemed like we were slow all night.”
Playing three games in four nights, with Sunday’s off day being spent on a long flight covering two time zones and nearly 1,800 miles, was presumably a factor.
But somehow, the Penguins found a way to get the game into overtime.
Jarry made another spectacular save in the third period, loading up to lunge across his crease and get his blocker on Matthew Tkachuk’s rebound attempt. Then, with 7:25 left in regulation, Jake Guentzel scored on the first power play of the night to tie the score and extend the NHL’s longest point streak to 10 games.
Early in overtime, Gaudreau put another shot off a post. Three minutes later, after Gaudreau pulled the puck through Sidney Crosby to get a great look from a few feet out, Jarry robbed Gaudreau with a glove save to get it to a shootout.
Calgary’s Mikael Backlund bested Jarry in the seventh round to win it, 2-1.
Afterward, Sullivan was hard-pressed to find a positive other than his goalie.
“He certainly played well,” he said. “He helped us earn an important point.”
The Penguins were looking to start a new winning streak Monday in Calgary after the Montreal Canadiens snapped their five-game run Saturday at PPG Paints Arena. But this listless loss was the second loss in a row for Sullivan’s squad.
The Penguins will continue their four-game road trip on Wednesday when they visit Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and the high-scoring Edmonton Oilers.
Matt Vensel: mvensel@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mattvensel.
First Published: November 30, 2021, 5:02 a.m.
