NEW YORK -- "You've gotta give our guys credit. We had some guys step up. We're headed in the right direction here."
This was Jared McCann. And yeah, he was eventually found, safe and sound.
For anyone who missed the waning minutes of the Penguins' 4-3 overtime loss to the Islanders on this Thursday night at Barclays Center, he'd been bizarrely banished to the locker room by one of two bungling referees ... even though there hadn't been a penalty called on him. And then, once this dawned on one or both, they skated to the visitors' bench to ask someone to summon him back.
No, seriously.
The short-straw assignment went to newly recalled Zach Trotman, who was sent sprinting down the tunnel ...
... after which he'd rush back to report McCann was getting ready.
Where was he?
"Right here," McCann would say later from the same stall. "Took my shoulder pads off. Started getting undressed. I was done, right?"
Mike Sullivan beseeched the bungling referees -- it doesn't feel right citing the collective work of T.J. Luxmore and Jean Hebert on this night without the descriptive adjective -- to wait for McCann to return for the final 2:18. Given that the Penguins needed a goal to tie and they were missing a vital quarter of their roster, he was kind of essential.
"Yes, we would've," Sullivan curtly replied when asked if he'd have preferred they wait.
They did. For about a minute. And then they dropped the puck. Even though it was, by their own visible, tangible admission, their mistake in sending a player completely off the ice.
No, seriously.
If that were the extent of their butchery on this night, that wouldn't have been a big deal. But when the Islanders, who have the NHL's fewest power plays, benefited from seven penalties against the Penguins, the league's second-least penalized team, and the visitors have only two-plus, something's generally amiss. And when Brandon Tanev was blatantly boarded by the Islanders' Anders Lee ...
... to lead into the dust-up that resulted in McCann errantly being ejected, that's another level altogether.
No one wanted to talk much about officiating, least of all Sullivan. That's the norm. He hates it. Sees nothing but negatives from doing so.
"It doesn't matter what I think," came the standard comeback. "You know, the referees are going to call the game the way they see it. We've got to live with it."
I tried McCann, tiptoeing around a nice way to word the question in hopes of getting an actual answer.
"Yeah, there's no nice way to put that," he replied somewhat substantively. "You know, it's frustrating for us as players. But we had no control over it. We just had to battle. And we did."
They did. They really did.
And that's where I'll boomerang way back up to the top of the column and McCann's quote about heading in the right direction.
Because they are. They really are.
Look, I know no one, including the participants themselves, want to hear this right now, but these two games against the Islanders -- despite the blown leads, despite Brock Nelson scoring in both overtimes -- have brought far more positives than negatives from this perspective.
Let me put it these three ways:
1. The refereeing's rarely this bad.
Or bungling, sorry. But it's true. Luxmore, in particular, is awful. And most nights, though there's the occasional complaint about a call, this was an all-out circus from front to finish.
As such, it's an outlier across the board for the Penguins to give up even a couple power plays, let alone seven, or to give up a couple power-play goals, as they did in this game after none in the previous 10. So this means next to nothing aside from a few grunts on the way out to the bus.
2. Few opponents are this hot. Ever.
The Islanders extended their points streak to a franchise-record 16, I'm betting you've heard. Well, it's on merit. They're fast, they're skilled, they're organized, they're deep, and they're all that and more:
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But in the same breath, allow me to add that New York's lineup is missing only Tom Kuhnhackl to injury. And during this historic run, in which they've gone 15-0-1, they've conceded a grand total of eight points ... half of those to the Penguins, who are 1-0-2 against them, with all three meetings reaching overtime.
Which leads smoothly into this ...
1. They'll get healthy again.
I think so, anyway.
But on the day Sullivan put forth two more bursts of bad news -- Justin Schultz out 'longer-term' with a lower-body injury, Nick Bjugstad out a minimum eight weeks after core-muscle surgery -- this was precisely the way for this group to respond: They defended authoritatively, they dictated five-on-five possession -- 23-14 in shots, 35-29 in chances, 9-6 in high-danger chances -- and they fought like hell to tie, 3-3, with 29.9 ticks left on Patric Hornqvist's welcome return to the lineup:
Feels like this requires a reminder: Sidney Crosby isn't playing. Neither is Kris Letang. And with Schultz out, Chad Ruhwedel and Trotman saw their first NHL action of the fall.
And they're this competitive?
Against this opponent?
With this awful officiating?
I'd brought up how the Penguins needed to play without all these guys before the game with Sullivan, and his answer then was little different than afterward:
"Yes," he answered. "It was a collective effort. It was team play on both sides of the puck, and that's how we have to play, especially in the circumstance we're in right now."
The players seemed to feel the same.
"It's super-important that we keep going like this," Jack Johnson was telling me. "If you look back at our whole season so far, I'd say there's been no more than four times where we haven't played this way. It's frustrating not to get the extra point, but we know how we're playing."
"Overall, we had a really good game," Bryan Rust said. "That's how overtime goes: They had one good chance, and they scored."
Count the blessings. All the plusses above will lead to real results. The catch, of course, will be to continue putting up points until all those stars align again, but they achieved that here, too.
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