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NEW YORK – Riding the hockey ladder, Teddy Blueger's test report was always the same.
Great defensive centerman. An offensive game leaves something to be desired.
Twenty-three games after his NHL career, Blueger is doing his part to destroy this scouting report.
Blueger scored two goals as the Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the dark debut of their 5-2 win over the New York Rangers on Monday night.
"We know we have the firepower to come back into that kind of match," said Blueger. "This is not the first time we have broken down. We did not let ourselves go and kept pushing and putting ourselves back inside. "
The Penguins finished a four-game road trip with a 3-0-1 record. They returned to second place with the New York Islanders in the metropolitan division, one point behind first place in Washington.
In the Eastern Conference playoff race, the Penguins earned seven points on eighth place in Montreal and nine points ahead of Columbus, ninth.
Blueger's goals ensured that the Penguins would not have to suffer the same type of nail bite that they had suffered in the first three stages of the trip.
At the end of the second period, having failed in a two-on-one with Bryan Rust, he came out of the back of the left post and let out the keeper Alexandar Georgiev to give the Penguins a 4-2 lead .
In the third, he blocked Jared McCann's rebound from a shot to make it 5-2.
Blueger has scored six goals and 10 points in 23 games and stands out admirably as a second-line center while Evgeni Malkin is about to recover from an upper-body injury. But check out Mike Sullivan's assessment of the rookie match even after Monday night's game:
"Teddy is a good player," Sullivan said. "He is a conscientious player, a good double-edged player, excellent defensive awareness, good sense of defense, a good penalty killer and an offensive production ability."
That's five points on his defense before mentioning his offense. Of course, Sullivan is a compliment, but Blueger would immediately make that clear.
"Maybe when I got to Wilkes, I was probably a little too labeled as a defensive guy and a mill," Blueger said. "The last two years, I could show that I could score. It's not because I have more defensive responsibilities that I can not score. "
Given the start of the Penguins games, it's a good thing that Blueger can score.
They lost 2-0 to a team of Rangers in reconstruction, reduced to nothing by the exchanges of the season. Brendan Lemieux finished the race against three and Vinni Lettieri converted into a power play.
"It did not really mean much," said Nick Bjugstad. "We all knew what the contract was. We just had to be better, the end result. "
Thirty-four seconds after Lettieri's goal, Bjugstad conceded a rebound by Marcus Pettersson to take the score to 2-1 and start the comeback.
"It was a huge goal because it allowed us to keep the game close at hand," said Sullivan.
At the start of the second half, Sidney Crosby grabbed a Phil Kessel pass from behind the net and found Justin Schultz sneaking into the top slot from the left-hand point to put the score at 2-2. About six minutes later, Matt Cullen came out of the corner on the right and threw a puck on Georgiev 's shoulder to give the Penguins the advantage.
"It was not our best," Sullivan said. "We knew it. Our players knew it. To their credit, they responded well in the second and last 40 minutes. "
Jonathan Bombulie is an editor of Tribune-Review. You can contact Jonathan by email at [email protected] or via Twitter. .
