PHILADELPHIA -- Teams have to do a lot of things well to go 31-14-5 during any 50-game stretch.
Making excuses isn't one of them.
That being the case, Mike Sullivan's reaction to the Penguins' lackluster performance during their 3-0 loss to the Flyers at Wells Fargo Center Tuesday night was utterly predicable.
He didn't care that his team was playing its 11th game in 20 nights, or its fourth in the past six. Or that injuries have forced nearly everyone on his roster to take on more responsibilities -- or, at least, playing time -- than expected when this season began.
No, the NHL is a bottom-line business, and Sullivan knew exactly what he liked about the Penguins' play on this night.
Absolutely nothing.
Maybe less than that.
"We just weren't very good," he said. "There wasn't anything (positive) for me. It was a lack of execution, a lack of attention to detail. No sense of urgency. No cooperative play. You can't play that way in this league and expect to win.
"Tonight, we were easy to play against. ... We didn't chip bodies, finish checks. We didn't make great decisions with the puck. We didn't execute when we had it. There's nothing positive that I can draw on from this game."
The Penguins were uncharacteristically flat from the earliest shifts, looking very much like a team that had averaged better than a game-every-other-day for the better part of three weeks -- and with travel wedged between every one of those.
They played as if physically drained and emotionally bankrupt, which happens in games against the Flyers about as often as Philadelphia stages a Stanley Cup parade.
"For whatever reason, we didn't have it tonight," Sidney Crosby said. "It's unfortunate. It's a big divisional game. It seemed like they wanted it more."
The primary beneficiary of that was Flyers goalie Brian Elliott, who had been chased from the game in two of his previous three starts against the Penguins, but had to face only 19 shots in this game.
What's more, only one of those -- by Bryan Rust off a Crosby set-up in the third period -- appeared to constitute a legitimate threat to Elliott's shutout bid.
After consistently generating the kind of shots on goal that can give Elliott the most trouble -- the ones that are on goal -- during a 7-1 victory over Philadelphia Oct. 29 at PPG Paints Arena, they allowed him to have a night during which his greatest challenge was resisting the temptation to curl up in the crease and take a nap.
The Flyers played well in front of Elliott, but the Penguins didn't force him to deal with nearly enough pucks or bodies around his crease.
"Give them credit," Rust said. "They played hard. They played a smart, simple, hard game and they were rewarded for it. ... We probably could have shot a lot more pucks than we did and got a lot more traffic."
Philadelphia had no trouble generating lots of both against Tristan Jarry, who turned aside 27 of 29 shots to give the Penguins a chance to take a point or two out of this game. In theory, anyway.
Jarry was beaten only by a Jakub Voracek backhander from close range and a James van Riemsdyk re-direction, both in the second period.
"They were two good plays," Jarry said.
No question, and just one of them would have been enough to secure a victory for the Flyers, given the Penguins' inability to manufacture sustained pressure or an occasional scoring chance that was remotely close to menacing.
Even when Sullivan moved Crosby onto a line with Rust and Evgeni Malkin, Elliott never was in danger of having his sweat glands shut down because they were being overused. Indeed, if the Flyers' equipment staff laundered his sweater after the game, it was probably just force of habit.
And the Penguins' frustrations and failures weren't confined to the attacking zone. Their game lacked energy and crispness all over the ice.
"We definitely didn't do enough," Teddy Blueger said. "They won more puck battles. They were first at pucks more."
That hasn't happened to the Penguins very often in 2019-20, which might be why this defeat stung them so badly.
"I would hope they're as disappointed as I am in how we played tonight," Sullivan said. "I just know that we're a way better team and that we're capable of much more and that the level of expectation and the standard is a lot higher. ... We weren't good tonight."
But they have been more often than anyone could reasonably have expected under the circumstances, which is why they will enter the stretch drive next week with a legitimate chance to contend for not only first place in the Metropolitan Division, but the top spot in the overall standings.
"We have to be very satisfied with what we've been doing," Jared McCann said. "It stinks, leaving on a bad note, but all-in-all, we've had some guys on this team who have really stepped up and become huge for us."
The Penguins now enter the NHL's all-star break, which segues into their "bye week." They will not play again until Philadelphia visits PPG Paints Arena Jan. 31, so they will have more than a week to marinate in all that displeased them about this game.
"It stinks that we have the break now," McCann said. "We're going to think about this game for a long time."
There will be plenty for them to ponder, for there was an awful lot of sloppy execution, poor decision-making and suspect puck management, among other things, shoehorned into these 60 minutes.
One thing they won't dwell on, however, is the frenetic schedule they've been on lately. Although it might well be a valid explanation for their uncharacteristically lackluster work at Wells Fargo Center, the Penguins don't seem inclined to entertain that thought.
"We haven't made excuses all year," Crosby said. "We're not going to start now."
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