PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – After being outplayed again at home by your rival, in the playoffs, Pens head coach Dan Muse called on all to look in the mirror and figure out what you are going to do. Philadelphia wins 3-0 Monday night taking a 2-0 series lead.
It was a Pens team that looked frustrated, played frustrated and then showed it with some late fighting.
“There should be frustration,” Muse said. “They should be frustrated we just lost two games at home.”
“With frustration comes how are you going to respond? How are we going to respond? I would hope every single guy in that room, the entire staff nobody is happy right now, nobody should be. Tomorrow we have to make a decision in terms of are we going to stay with it, stay with what we want to do, get to our game which we haven’t gotten to in two games, or are we going to let frustration continue to boil over into the next one?”
“That’s going to be a choice all of us, including myself, are going to have to make over the next 24 hours.”
“It sucks right now, we got outplayed for two games at home,” said defenseman Erik Karlsson. “It hurts, but we have no one to blame but ourselves.”
It took the Pens, the third-highest scoring team in the NHL during the 2025-26 season, over half of the game to reach double-digit shots. Whether it was hesitating, thinking too much, trying to be too perfect, a combination of all three. Philly blocked 23 shots Monday after 14 on Saturday and the Pens have two goals all series.
“I don’t think this is something that is just common to us in this series, this is playoff hockey,” Muse said. “Everything is harder, it’s supposed to be harder, it’s the NHL playoffs. Everybody is going to be in lanes. Everybody should be in lanes. You are going to have to do those little things that are going to give you an extra inch, finding the shot lane a little bit quicker, working to get to the net front a little bit faster. All of those things are in play, not just for us, it’s across the league.”
Occasionally Muse has seen it in the first pair of games, but far too sporadically. They are rarely stacking shifts which they did well for most of the regular season.
“We don’t really get in sync, you would think we would dictate what we would want to do out there,” Karlsson said. “They are doing a good job and we are not, that is the bottom line.”
Add to that Flyers head coach Rick Tocchet said he wasn’t totally pleased with his team. He thought they gave the Pens too many opportunities and allowed them too much momentum.
Now the former Pens three-time Stanley Cup winner takes his Philly team home to what is going to be an environment like this group hasn’t seen all season.
“I think we’ve been in some tough spots all year,” said Sidney Crosby, who is going to be the center of the Flyers fans outbursts. “We’ve always responded really well to adversity. It seems like it’s brought out the best in all of us. Getting on the road and having a situation like this hopefully brings out the best in us again.”
“Truthfully, they haven’t given us much,” said Pens goalie Stuart Skinner. “We got to find a way to break that down. It’s a really good team we are facing. We should be a very confident group. We got the guys, we’ve been doing it all year. There’s no reason we can’t do it next game.”
“Everybody in here is looking forward to get out of Pittsburgh a little bit and go to Philly and hopefully the hostile environment can make us just focus on playing the situation we are in and not what is going on around us,” Karlsson said.
In this year of flipping the script, that might be the ultimate reversal.
LISTEN to what was said in the locker room after a 3-0 loss to Philly in Game 2
LISTEN to what was said in the locker room after a 3-0 loss to Philly in Game 2
