Penguins remain confident that they will close out the series in Game 6

The Ottawa Senators have new life behind a 56 save performance from goaltender Pascal LeClaire Thursday night. All of a sudden a team that didn’t have an identity in the series, has a bit of confidence heading back to Ottawa.

In a game where the Senators needed their goaltender to steal a game, they got it from LeClaire who had to deal with an aggressive offensive attack from Pittsburgh.

The Penguins pushed the play offensively, out shooting Ottawa 59-44. That number could have easily been in the 80-90 range as the Penguins had 20 missed shots and Ottawa blocked an impressive 46 shots in the game, led by Anton Volchenkov’s game-high 11.

Coming into game 5, the Penguins had the Senators down and out. A poor start by Pittsburgh in game 5, has the Senators back in the series.

Pittsburgh was unable to take advantage of a Jarkko Ruutu penalty, a 1:24 in, and an ill-advised Mike Rupp penalty at the 10:01 mark put the Senators on the power play and Mike Fisher scored 24 seconds later for the Senators 7th power play goal of the series. Jarkko Ruutu scored a 1:08 later and Pittsburgh was quickly in a 2-0 hole.

Pittsburgh was 1-for-7 on the power play and managed only 6 shots on goal in seven opportunities.

After not being able to close out the series at home Thursday night, Penguins captain Sidney Crosby remains confident that this series won’t come back to Pittsburgh. “You play the right way, eventually you get rewarded, ” Crosby said.

“We’re pretty confident that we stick with things, we’ll get the result we want.”

Just how dominant has Sidney Crosby been? He has 28 points in his last 10 games, dating back to his final five regular season games.

Thursday’s game will go down in history as it was the second-longest in the history of Mellon Arena and the third longest in Penguins’ history.

The Penguins were departing for Ottawa early this morning. They will have an off-day and head coach Dan Bylsma will have a short media session later this afternoon.

Game 6 is Saturday night at 7:00 p.m.