The first week of an NHL season can still look a little loose around the edges, and the Penguins’ 6-5 overtime win over Montreal offered a pair of textbook examples.
Pittsburgh opened the year with a 7-0 rout of Philadelphia, then had to grind through a much messier night against the Canadiens. The game produced two goals that came from the kind of early-season defensive breakdowns teams spend October trying to clean up.
On Montreal’s first goal, the Penguins stacked too many mistakes into a tiny window. Both F1 and F2 - #81 Kindel and #22 Lapierre - drifted toward the offensive side of the puck even though MTL13 Caufield had full control and his head up.
Caufield then fed the puck into the middle for MTL48 Hutson, who attacked the space between F2 Lapierre and F3 Dewar. From there, PIT6 Korczak stepped up on MTL14 Suzuki but ended up giving him room to skate into open ice.
PIT19 Dewar got back early as F3 to avoid an odd-man rush, but he was out of sync and left in no-man’s land when the puck went cross-ice. To finish the sequence, D2 PIT49 Girard didn’t box out soon enough and lost the battle to MTL22 Kreider in front of the goalie’s sight line.
It was five avoidable errors in about 10 seconds, and Montreal cashed in.
Pittsburgh then benefited from a nearly identical kind of lapse at the other end. Montreal’s F1 and F2 were both up ice, with F3 nowhere in sight, even though the team’s neutral-zone forecheck is, in theory, a 1-2-2 - the same setup Pittsburgh uses.
Caufield, playing F2, missed on the stick check against Pittsburgh’s buildup pass, and that opened the middle lane between F2 and F3 Suzuki. D1 MTL8 Matheson then unintentionally pulled the puck carrier toward the center, while Suzuki stayed too deep to help.
The sequence ended with MTL75 Dobes, unscreened, misreading the shot from distance.
That’s the October story in a nutshell: one mistake doesn’t usually sink you, but four or five in a row absolutely can. For Pittsburgh and Montreal, the task now is simple enough to say and hard enough to execute - stop the chain reaction before a small lapse turns into a goal.
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