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The Pittsburgh Penguins will look to ride some of the momentum they gained in a 5-4 overtime win against the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday when they take on the Boston Bruins for a matinee matchup on Saturday.
In Thursday’s win, the Penguins were down, 3-0, and head coach Mike Sullivan made the decision to pull Alex Nedeljkovic in favor of rookie Joel Blomqvist. Nedeljkovic then had a bit of a meltdown, but that “meltdown” sparked the team on the comeback trail and, ultimately, helped the Penguins pull off an improbable win.
The team rallied around Nedeljkovic, and he will be right back in net on Saturday.
“Ned kind of gave us a little bit of a wake-up call,” forward Philip Tomasino said, who has four goals in his last eight games. “It was needed. I thought we left him out to dry a little bit. Blommer did a heck of a job coming in there. Once we started going, we played really well. Wanted to get that one back for Ned, for sure.”
The Penguins will also be facing a Bruins team that – like the Penguins – is fighting for playing hopes and seeing them start to dwindle as the season winds down. They sit four points behind Columbus for the final wild card spot in the East, while Pittsburgh sits nine points back.
The Bruins are 4-6 in their last 10 games, and they lost the first matchup of their season series against the Penguins, 2-1, on Nov. 29 – which was, arguably, one of the Penguins’ most complete games of the season. And the games are always tight against Boston – with six of their last 10 matchups being one-goal games – so Pittsburgh will have to bring their best game as well as their best available lineup.
Defenseman P.O Joseph is in for Ryan Graves on the left side, while forward Emil Bemstrom – recalled from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton on Thursday – is in for Boko Imama.
Here is the rest of the Penguins’ lineup for Saturday’s tilt:
Forward Rickard Rakell – pointless in his last three games – is just two points shy of 500 for his career. Rakell has also gone five straight games without a goal, with his last one – and 25th of the season – coming in a Feb. 7 win against the New York Rangers when he was, briefly, the team’s first-line center in place of a then-injured Sidney Crosby.
Crosby has the most points in his NHL career against the Boston Bruins of any active player, as his 74 points in 60 games against Boston best the next-closest active player – Alex Ovechkin – by 15 points.
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