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WILKES-BARRE TWP. — The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins followed up a sloppy first period Friday night with two outstanding periods of hockey to knock off a first-place team.
After a sluggish first period in which the teams combined for just 10 shots, there was no such turnaround by the Penguins Saturday night.
“It is frustrating for sure,” Penguins coach J.D. Forrest said when the team was unable to take advantage of consecutive games at Mohegan Sun Arena, falling to the Providence Bruins 5-1. “I just thought in the first period that neither team was very good. There weren’t a lot of chances either way.
“Then, we were just flat in the second. You put yourself in a hole that’s tough coming back from.”
Providence scored twice in the second period to open a 3-0 lead.
Even when the Penguins started producing more chances early in the third period, they could not sustain the surge.
“I would say there’s a handful of guys (who) were where we wanted to be and a handful that weren’t,” Forrest said. “The way we’re built right now, we can’t really have more than a couple guys not showing up or having off nights.
“It makes it difficult to put together a whole game. If you rely on X amount of players, you just can’t put them out there all the time. You have to have other guys going. I thought it was a little bit of that.”
Friday’s 5-3 victory over the Cleveland Monsters put the Penguins in position where they could catch Providence and take over third place out of eight teams in the Atlantic Division.
They were not up to the task as Jesper Boqvist scored two goals and assisted on two others for the Bruins.
“It’s disappointing,” Forrest said. “You don’t want to play like that at home. You want to string together more than one win in a row here and make it a tough place to play.
“We didn’t do a very good job of that tonight.”
Georgii Merkulov, who also had two goals, gave Providence the lead 5:53 into an otherwise uneventful first period.
Justin Brazeau scored midway through the second period on Boqvist’s second assist, then returned the favor with 4:01 left in the period when Boqvist converted a rebound at the end of a 3-on-2 rush.
Merkulov made it 4-0 before Alex Nylander scored for the Penguins.
Nylander’s power-play goal broke the shutout. His shot from near the right point got through traffic giving Nylander three goals in the last two games and a team-high eight on the season.
Ty Smith and Peter Abbandonato had the assists. Smith, the team points leader, pushed his team-leading assist total to 14.
Boqvist added an empty-net goal with 3:47 left. Merkulov had one of the assists.
The Penguins outshot the Bruins 17-6 in the third period and 31-23 for the game.
Joel Blomqvist took the loss in net.
The Penguins (11-9-3-0) held on to fourth place in the division going into Wednesday’s home game against the Syracuse Crunch.