Randall Flagg

Risto ended just a shade under 24. Better. take 1.5 minutes off of that and he just may be able to play like this for 6 months.

Oh, and the Larsson line. Another summer of people wanting to throw him and Z out as if they're easy to replace. Another game where they have the puck 60%of the time whether they're on the ice against Aston-Reese or Malkin. It's incredibly valuable, and we're going on our second season in a row with a fourth line that can actually flip the ice rather than getting blasted in the ass for 8 minutes a night. It's meaningful, and they're good at what they do, and it's not trivial to replace that, as we saw for the 7 years before last one. Nice work for those guys. And how many breakaways and 2 on 1s were sprung by our defensemen? That's Botterill's defensive vision really playing out about as well as it can. Our D can move and they can pass and it's going to get us goals.

Had a phone call to take during our second PP, just finished the game. Rock solid road win. Independent of how our boys took it to them, was Pittsburgh drunk? They looked terrible. We were refreshingly fast with the puck, and took advantage of Pittsburgh's porous defense. If we can consistently generate shots like we did today, we are simply a good team. We handled ourselves well defensively, despite the chaos Pittsburgh can inevitably create, and Hutton was good, and he didn't need to be great. Eichel's points will come. He was wonderful defensively on a lot of shifts. Sam and Dahlin...woah. Mitts with two nice plays for two well-deserved assists. This is not a Sobotka point, just a point on the line in general - aside from Johansson's pass to Jeff and a shift in the third, it looks like their chemistry has to be built from scratch. I'm not seeing any. This always seems to be an issue for Jeff unless he's with Jack, and I predict they'll be back together within 10 games. It took them 7 games to start last season before doing it. No players had bad games. Jokiharju had his best showing as a Sabre IMO. The game wasn't too big for him. McCabe was awesome and you can tell he takes that A to heart. Sam is so good. Colin Miller had an awkward game but was fine overall. Two points now are just as sweet as two points in April. Feels good to win the first one, and I hope the building gives the players the noise they deserve on Saturday.

So it looks like the sweet spot is four infractions per penalty for Pittsburgh

Yeah the Penguins have committed about 3 blatant penalties so far today.

Bad angle from Carter.

Simply killed that entire possession, which should have been dangerous. Those shifts will pile up the more time he spends there

Gotta handle that pass in the top six Vladdy

It's a reasonable PK pairing. I hope, this season, they make it their PK pairing while still holding them under 22 minutes per game. It wouldn't exactly be difficult to do

Solid period, both teams loosey goosey defensively as you'd expect in October.

Does this violate that rule?

Geno is still a thoroughbred horse

Love Olofsson sliding into that open space

Fully anticipate 26:10 average TOI for Risto this year

What was the problem that rule is trying to eliminate?

I thought you only couldn't do that in the crease? WTF do you call what auston matthews did to score against us last November then?

Is that a new thing?

Miller appears to have the jitters early.

Sheary scored our first goal last year too

Really was a sweet shift.

Nice defense from Jacky boy And a reverse check, sweet.

Nice check from Jake. He wasn't at the one where Rick actually had issues though, eh?

The boys are skating to that forecheck. The 50th logo doesn't look orange on my TV like it does on my laptop.

Has this always been the case, or is it a function of Rick maybe not always feeling so great?

Wait, didn't Dunleavy give a pregame interview? Does he travel with the team even when he doesn't call the game?