Our preview asked whether Saturday's leak in front of Utah's net was one bad night or the start of a habit. One bad night, mostly. Pittsburgh came in averaging 10.4 five-on-five shots on goal from inside 25 feet and got six on Monday, four of them in the third period, after Utah went up 5-2. Utah won 5-4 at the Delta Center, and most of the arguing afterward was about Sebastian Cossa. We'd aim it somewhere else. Pittsburgh's four goals came from a penalty kill that was beaten inside a minute both times it went out, and from a third period in which Utah let the Penguins back to the net. Cossa is the reason the last chance of the night didn't go in.
Forty minutes of the fix
For two periods at five-on-five, Pittsburgh put 10 shots on goal, and only two came from inside 25 feet: Blake Lizotte's from about 7 feet in the first and Nick Robertson's from about 24 in the second. Cossa stopped both. At the other end, Utah put 24 five-on-five shots on goal over those two periods. In all situations it outshot the Penguins 24-13, and 16-6 in the first period alone.
Four of Utah's five goals came at five-on-five, and three of them came from the front of the net. Clayton Keller tied it 1-1 on a backhand from about 13 feet, set up by Lawson Crouse. Kevin Stenlund scored from about 7 feet two seconds after a Mikhail Sergachev shot. Kailer Yamamoto tipped in a Nate Schmidt pass from about 3 feet for the 4-2 lead. The exception was Schmidt's own goal, a slap shot from about 60 feet at 11:44 of the second. It was the first goal of the season for both Schmidt and Stenlund, and Yamamoto now has five points in five games. "Kailer Yamamoto should've been in the lineup since the first game," Chase Beardsley of The Hockey News posted on X. Nobody we saw argued.
Across the whole night Utah won five-on-five 27-15 in shots on goal and 12-6 in shots on goal from inside 25 feet. That was the part of the ice we worried about, and Utah won it. The third period is where it slipped.
The kill gave two back
Pittsburgh's power play came to Salt Lake 21st in the league at 17.9 percent. On Monday it scored on both of its chances. Dylan Guenther tripped a Penguin 19 seconds in, and Erik Karlsson's slap shot from about 52 feet went in 52 seconds later. It was Pittsburgh's first shot on goal. Keller took a high-sticking minor at 6:53 of the second, and Rickard Rakell scored from about 7 feet eight seconds later to tie it 2-2.
Two power-play shots on Cossa, two goals. At even strength he stopped 15 of 17, per the NHL box score. One fan asked on X during the second period, "did the penguins pp get good or does the mammoth pk suck". We'd take the second option. Utah's kill came in 25th at 73.3 percent, and Monday didn't help. Utah's own power play, first in the league, went 1-for-2, so the special-teams edge we expected went to Pittsburgh, 2-1.
Then the third
Nick Schmaltz made it 5-2 on the power play 1:36 into the third, with a backhand from about 6 feet. That goal held up as the winner, so Utah's one power-play goal decided a night when its kill gave up two. Pittsburgh scored 79 seconds later. Egor Chinakhov beat Cossa from about 18 feet, and Brogan Houston of the Deseret News posted on X that Dmitri Simashev skated past the bench without grabbing a stick, "taking himself out of the play completely." Simashev finished minus-2, the only Utah skater below even.
Then the Penguins kept coming. In the third they put four five-on-five shots on goal from inside 25 feet, twice as many as they had in the first two periods combined, and Utah had five shots on goal in the whole period, counting all situations. At 14:55 Declan Carlile scored from about 18 feet, two seconds after Cossa stopped Rakell's tip from about 14. Some of that is what leading teams do: they sit back and get outshot. But a three-goal lead with 18 minutes left shouldn't end with Arturs Silovs on the bench for an extra attacker and Ben Kindel shooting from about 8 feet with five seconds left. Cossa stopped that one too.
The goalie argument
Utah fans spent the whole night on Cossa. Some defended him in the first period ("I swear some of y’all complain just to complain why am I already seeing complaints about cossa," one fan posted on X). Late in the game the doubters were louder. "Cossa doesn’t look like the backup I had hoped he’d be," another wrote on X.
Look at the four goals. Two came on the power play, a slap shot from about 52 feet and a shot from 7 feet eight seconds into the penalty. Carlile's came two seconds after Cossa had stopped a tip. Chinakhov's, from 18 feet, is the only one we'd put a question mark next to, and by Houston's account Simashev was out of that play before the shot.
The case against him is the season. Cossa came in at .839 over three appearances, 26 saves on 31 shots, and after Monday he's at .820, 41 of 50 in four. Monday alone was .789, 15 of 19. Nineteen shots won't tell anyone whether he's the backup this team needs, and we wouldn't use them to say he is. They don't make a case against him either. Utah gave up four goals on Monday, and two of them were on the kill.
Where the preview missed
We picked Utah 4-2. Right winner, double the goals against. On the close shots, we were right about the volume and wrong about the finish. We expected double digits from Pittsburgh at five-on-five from inside 25 feet, and it got six. We said Utah's goalies would keep stopping about five in six of those, and two of the six went in. Our line for being wrong was three, so the Penguins stopped one short of it. Saturday, Edmonton scored on five of 10. Monday, Pittsburgh scored on two of six. That's a lot better than Saturday, but two of six is still about twice Utah's rate coming in, when its goalies had allowed 11 of 65 at five-on-five.
The bigger miss was special teams. We wrote that the rest of the card leaned Utah, power play included. Pittsburgh's 21st-ranked power play outscored Utah's first-ranked one. We guessed Silovs would start for Pittsburgh, and he did.
Utah is 7-3-0 and has its first home win over Pittsburgh in three tries. Next is Seattle on Thursday, on the road (schedule). The kill is the thing to watch, and so is the net. If Cossa gets another start soon, Monday's last save will be why.
Tusks up.
Sources: NHL.com box score and play-by-play (shot locations and strength splits are our analysis of the NHL's data, so treat distances as approximate), NHL schedule data for the series history, posts on X by Brogan Houston of the Deseret News and Chase Beardsley, fan posts on X, our preview, our Oct. 18 recap.