PHILADELPHIA – The visiting Pittsburgh Penguins took a 2-1 lead in to the opening stanza on Monday night and cruised to a 4-1 win over the Flyers. Alex Nedeljkovic made 36 saves in the win.
“[The Flyers] were, I think, four points in front of us with a game in hand for us, so it was kind of like a four-point swing,” Nedeljkovic said. “We still have that game in hand and we’re two points closer now, so it was huge.”
The Penguins improved to 20-15-4.
“I think he’s playing hard, he’s competing hard,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said of Malkin. “I think he’s just doing a better job at some of the subtleties or the little small details in his game, like stopping on pucks and not playing as much in constant motion. ‘Geno’ is a guy that likes to play in motion, but there are some times when you have to stop on pucks, and I think he’s doing a much better job just paying attention to those types of situations.”
Rickard Rakell staked the Pens to a 1-0 lead with 45 seconds of game fresh ice used.
“He just stuck with it,” Nedeljkovic said of Rakell. “He was getting a lot of chances at the start of the year there, the puck just wasn’t bouncing. It happens. Everybody goes through it at some point, just unfortunately for him it seemed to be pretty bad and didn’t seem like it was ever going to end. Once that first one came, you know the rest were going to come and you knew it was going to be easy the rest of the way. He makes it look easy, but he works hard every day in practice. He’s trying to score every time he shoots the puck.”
Erik Karlsson pushed the advantage to 2-0 at 7:37Â of the first with a shot from the blue line on the right side.
Philadelphia dropped 20-14-6.
“We just weren’t good,” Flyers coach John Tortorella said. “We were not good enough in either end, and that’s the result.”
Owen Tippett was the lone striker for the Flyers, his first period goal trimmed the Pens lead to 2-1 headed to the second period.
Tippett scored off the power play at 14:55.
In the middle frame, Chad Ruhwedel restored the two-goal lead at 8:07.
“Third goal was the one that gets you,” Tortorella said. “We spent too much time in our end zone. We didn’t come out clean enough. … We just weren’t clean coming out and if you give that team opportunities on breakouts, sooner or later the momentum changes. I thought we fought, we just struggled scoring. We don’t have enough people going offensively. They were the better team.”
Evgeni Malkin struck at 4:29 of the third to make the final count, 4-1. 
Carter Hart made 35 saves in the loss.
“I think giving one up early on the power play allowed their skill guys to get feeling it a little bit,” the Flyers’ Travis Sanheim said. “You could just sense it, they were making plays.”
 
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