Crosby Hit by the Linesman Early, Then Sets Up the Tying Goal as Penguins Win in OT

TL;DR: Sidney Crosby collided with a linesman and went down hard in the opening minutes of Pittsburgh’s game against Nashville on Saturday, then stayed in the game and set up the tying goal with 1:06 left in regulation. Rickard Rakell buried Crosby’s cross-ice pass with the goalie pulled, and Ville Koivunen scored with 1:16 left in overtime to give the short-handed Penguins a 3-2 win at PPG Paints Arena. Pittsburgh played without Evgeni Malkin, who missed the game through illness, and with six other skaters on injured reserve.

The strangest moment of Pittsburgh’s night came before the game had settled, and the most important one came with 66 seconds left. In between, a team missing half its lineup chased a Nashville side that kept giving the puck away, and a goalie who had stopped almost everything finally could not stop the last two shots. The Penguins won a game they had no business winning, and their captain was involved in both the weird part and the winning part.

What happened with the linesman?

Crosby collided with a linesman in the opening minutes and went down hard near the blue line, Markerzone reports, citing a clip shared by SportsNet Pittsburgh. PensBurgh describes the official accidentally catching the captain in the face. It was nobody’s fault, which is what makes it funny and worrying at the same time: the one person on the ice whose job is to stay out of the way became the first obstacle Crosby hit all night.

Crosby appeared to be okay afterward, Markerzone reports, and the rest of the game proved it. He finished with 19 minutes and 38 seconds of ice time, no shots on goal for the second game in a row, and one assist that mattered more than any shot he took. PensBurgh calls the collision the only notable moment for Crosby until the tying goal, which is a fair summary of a quiet night that ended loudly. No penalty or discipline followed the collision, because there was nothing to punish. Officials are part of the playing surface in hockey, and this one simply got in the way of the wrong skater at the wrong time.

How did Pittsburgh tie it so late?

By doing the one thing Nashville could not stop all night: giving Crosby the puck with space. With goalie Arturs Silovs pulled for an extra attacker and a little over two minutes left, Crosby controlled the puck in the left faceoff circle, chose not to shoot, and fed Rakell at the other circle, Reuters reports. Rakell buried it before Juuse Saros could glide across the crease, tying the game with 1:06 remaining.

The goal had a backstory inside the same game. Saros had stopped Rakell twice on breakaways, including a short-handed chance with less than eight minutes left, Reuters reports, and had made a season-high 34 saves. PensBurgh argues Saros was the reason this was not a Pittsburgh regulation win, and that he did not deserve to take the loss after giving up two late goals. That is the goalie’s version of the night. The Penguins’ version is simpler: they kept pushing, Nashville kept turning the puck over 24 times in total, and the 25th giveaway never came because the game ended first.

Who won it in overtime?

Ville Koivunen, with 1:16 left in the extra period. The Penguins held the puck for almost all of overtime, PensBurgh reports, until Koivunen found extra space in the offensive zone, moved to the middle of the ice and fired a wrist shot past Saros for a 3-2 win. It was Pittsburgh’s second straight win, and the first time the team has won consecutive games since starting the season 2-0, Reuters reports. Nashville fell to 0-4 in overtime and shootout games this season.

The rest of the scoring tells the same story of a game Pittsburgh kept refusing to lose. Connor Dewar tied it 18 seconds into the second period after Adam Wilsby failed to clear behind the Nashville net. Jayden Struble restored Nashville’s lead at 6:40 of the second. Stamkos had opened the scoring at 9:24 of the first, when Matthew Wood’s shot deflected off his skate, after coach Andrew Brunette moved Wood onto the top line following Thursday’s 6-0 loss at Boston. The Predators led twice and lost anyway, which is what happens when a team gives the puck away 24 times and its goalie finally runs out of saves.

How short-handed were the Penguins, really?

Short enough that the win is the story, not the collision. Malkin missed the game through illness, his first missed game of the season, PensBurgh reports, and Reuters notes Pittsburgh has six other skaters on injured reserve. PensBurgh counts three missing top-six forwards in Malkin, Chinakhov and Rust, plus defensemen Girard and van Riemsdyk, and Ben Kindel, whose medical episode on the Penguins’ flight was the team’s earlier scare this month. Chinakhov missed his second straight game with a lower-body injury. Avery Hayes, called up from the AHL to fill Malkin’s spot, played under 13 minutes with five shots, three hits and a takeaway in his NHL season debut, PensBurgh notes, which is the kind of contribution a depleted team needs from a player nobody planned on using. Pittsburgh has recent experience on the other side of the captain story too: Chicago’s Connor Bedard returned a month early for his captain’s debut against the Penguins earlier this month, so the building has already seen one captain rush back this season.

Silovs deserves part of the credit too. He made 24 saves for his third straight start, Reuters reports, and PensBurgh suggests he could get a fourth start on Monday’s form. The Penguins now get four days off before Utah visits on Thursday, which PensBurgh notes comes at the right time for a team waiting on bodies to return. The same Utah team, for the record, is the one that beat Tampa Bay in overtime on Saturday night, in the game where Kucherov broke Stamkos’s Lightning points record. Stamkos scored Nashville’s opener in Pittsburgh on the same night his old record fell in Salt Lake City, which is either a coincidence or a reminder that the league’s stories keep colliding with each other, sometimes literally.

What happens next?

Two questions follow Pittsburgh into its four days off. The first is whether Crosby needs any follow-up after the linesman collision, though nothing in the reporting suggests he missed a shift because of it. The second is who returns for Utah on Thursday, and whether a team that just won twice in a row with half its lineup missing can keep winning when the missing players come back. Elsewhere on Saturday in the NHL, Keith Yandle called Senators fans disgusting for booing a Brady Tkachuk tribute, which is a reminder that the league’s strangest moments were not confined to Pittsburgh. The collision will be the clip people remember from Saturday, because a captain getting flattened by an official is the kind of thing that only happens in hockey. The tying goal is the play that mattered, because it came from the same captain, 66 seconds from defeat, with the goalie pulled and the season’s early story still unwritten. For a team that has spent October short-handed, that is a better ending than anyone in the building expected when Crosby went down in the opening minutes.