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Pens ride four-minute wave of offense to top Ducks

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Depending upon whom you ask, the Pittsburgh Penguins answered many or few questions on Monday. No one can deny the score, however, as they beat the Anaheim Ducks 3-1 in a, well, odd duck of a game.

Penguins’ positives

Marc-Andre Fleury was brilliant when his team wasn’t so bright, including keeping the Ducks off the scoreboard in a first period where they generated a 12-3 shot disparity. Sidney Crosby scored his 10th goal of the 2013-14 season while Evgeni Malkin often asserted his will over the contest, collecting a pair of assists.

There’s also the great debut for Brian Gibbons, who notched the first goal and first assist of his career in his first NHL game.

Negatives

Still, that aforementioned first period was troubling and all four of the game’s goals came in 4:04 of game time in the final frame. For some, that might smell of blind luck or a Ducks team that ran out of gas. There will also be some who continue to gravitate toward Malkin’s lack of goals, even if he has almost an assist per game to “make up” for the lack of tallies (17 assists and 20 points overall in 21 games played).

That brings us to another undeniable factor: the Ducks will be glad to return to Anaheim. The Ducks went 0-3-1 in a four-game road trip through the East despite gaining the shot advantage in all four of those contests.
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Pittsburgh finds itself gaining on top East teams Boston and Tampa Bay while the Ducks may find themselves slipping a tier or two once other West teams catch up to their 23 games played. Both teams have been struggling a bit lately, so we’ll see if the Penguins use this as a bounce-back night.

Follow James O’Brien @cyclelikesedins