Mario Leads Pens To First Win

Six power-play goals lead to Penguins' win

Seven consecutive goals overcome Atlanta's early 4-0 lead, net 7-5 victory

Friday, October 28, 2005
By Dave Molinari, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Banks will be open for business today. Same with liquor stores, courts and government offices. Mail will be delivered, just like always. Mass transit will operate on the normal schedule. Garbage collection will proceed as planned.

Apparently, there hasn't been a holiday declared just because the Penguins won a hockey game last night. Perhaps that means the people in charge of such things are hoping it will become more than a once-a-year event.

But even if it does -- and no one should be taking anything for granted at this point -- it's unlikely the Penguins will do it in a more spectacular, improbable fashion than they did last night, when they spotted Atlanta a 4-0 lead before running off seven unanswered goals in a 7-5 victory at Mellon Arena.

"It was scary early in the game," said Mario Lemieux, who put on a pretty frightening show himself, piling up two goals and three assists.

"Mario led the way for us," winger Ryan Malone said. "It was awesome."

The victory was the first of the season for the Penguins (1-4-5), whose power play had one of the most productive nights in franchise history. It scored six times to tie a team record set in an 8-3 victory against Toronto Dec. 12, 1986.

"We've been working on it every day," said defenseman Sergei Gonchar, who scored two of the Penguins' man-advantage goals and assisted on another. "Finally, it paid off."

The Penguins not only got a victory, but some new-look lines. Lemieux played with Sidney Crosby and Mark Recchi, Rico Fata was between Malone and Ziggy Palffy, Lasse Pirjeta centered John LeClair and Konstantin Koltsov and Maxime Talbot was with Matt Murley and Ryan VandenBussche.

Lemieux endorsed having Crosby for a linemate -- "He's fun to play with. With the speed that he has, for me, that's something I need now" -- and liked the looks of the remaining three units, too.

"I thought the other lines were pretty good, as well," Lemieux said. "We'll see what happens."

Critical as this victory was, the Penguins sustained a significant loss: Defenseman Dick Tarnstrom injured the medial collateral ligament in his left knee when his skate stuck in the ice after he was hit from the side during the first period.

Although there was no formal report on the severity of his injury, preliminary indications are that he could be out 6-8 weeks.

The game attracted a crowd of 14,009, 14,008 of whom did not wear a paper bag over their head while sitting behind the Atlanta penalty box. Midway through the opening period, though, most of those fans probably wished they had brought one because the Penguins opened the game with some of their poorest work of the season.

Peter Diana, Post-GazetteThe Penguins' Sidney Crosby watches his shot miss as the puck gets behind the Thrashers' goalie last night at Mellon Arena.

They allowed Atlanta, which has lost six of its past seven games, to get not only the first 10 shots of the game, but also the first four goals.

Ilya Kovalchuk put Atlanta up, 1-0, at 3:18 of the opening period, and that triggered a deluge of offense from the Thrashers.

Before it stopped, Patrik Stefan (8:32), Peter Bondra (9:00) and Niclas Havelid (9:50) deposited pucks behind Penguins goalie Sebastien Caron.

"Out of that whole stretch of games, that was probably the worst of the worst," Malone said. "Four-nothing was probably the bottom of the barrel."

Penguins coach Eddie Olczyk used his timeout at that point -- perhaps to consider what it would be like to hold a less stressful job, like air-traffic controller in a war zone -- and it actually served the intended purpose of allowing his team to regroup.

"We reacted to the timeout pretty well," LeClair said. In large part, it seems, because of an inspirational message from LeClair.

He would say only that "everybody just realized that we had to play a lot better, play a lot smarter," but LeClair's teammates credited him with helping them focus on the task at hand.
"He showed a lot of leadership," Lemieux said.

Lemieux did a little leading, too, pointing his team down the path that led to its first victory by converting a Ric Jackman rebound at 10:03, then getting another power-play goal 21.8 seconds before the first intermission.

Gonchar pulled the Penguins within one when he knuckled a shot past Thrashers goalie Steve Shields from inside the right circle at 11:56 and tied the score by taking a cross-ice feed from Crosby and throwing the puck inside the left post at 14:50.

Thirty-one seconds later, LeClair backhanded a Palffy leftover into the net at 15:21 for what proved to be the winner. Jackman (16:06) and LeClair (14:10 of the third) added some insurance before Atlanta's Slava Kozlov closed out the scoring at 15:43.

While winning one game doesn't wipe out all the frustrations and failures of the past three weeks, it provides a bit of a respite from the pressure that had been building by the day.

"It feels good," Malone said. "We can breathe a little bit."

(Dave Molinari can be reached at 412-263-1144.)