Coyotes seek another win over playoff contender with Penguins visiting

The Arizona Coyotes will get another chance Monday to face a fellow team hoping to secure a playoff spot, just not an opponent vying for one of the same spots.

The Coyotes, in contention for a spot in the Western Conference postseason, will face the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins, who are battling for an Eastern Conference spot.

"It's nice to beat a team that's fighting for the playoffs, and so are we," Arizona winger Clayton Keller said after he scored twice Saturday in a 3-2 win over the Nashville Predators, a team just ahead of the Coyotes in the wild-card race.

This will be Arizona's fifth game out of six against a fellow team hanging around the wild-card spots. The Coyotes are 2-1-1 in those games.

"It's nice to string some together," said Keller, who has nine points over his past six games. "It's exciting, and when you're in games your team is playing hard, it's fun coming to the rink, and I feel like that's the feeling we have right now."

Arizona started January 1-4-0, but it has points in three of four games since then.

"We want to play meaningful games," Coyotes coach Andre Tourigny said. "(Saturday) was a real playoff game for us. There are four games before the (All-Star) break. We need to finish strong."

The Coyotes won despite first-line center Nick Schmaltz missing the game because of an upper-body injury. He is considered day to day and is expected to miss Monday's game.

Pittsburgh is coming in sore, too — sore at itself.

The Penguins were cruising along with a two-goal lead Saturday against a Vegas team riddled with injuries, but missed assignments, risky plays and lapses in defense allowed the Golden Knights to score three goals in the third, handing Pittsburgh a 3-2 loss.

The Penguins had been 10-3-3 in the 16 games before Saturday — a stretch that began Dec. 12 with a 4-2 win at home against Arizona — and have been making some progress toward climbing into a playoff position.

However, the inconsistency that has been a bane this season re-emerged in Saturday's collapse.

"You can't make the mistakes that we made and expect to win games," Pittsburgh captain Sidney Crosby said.

It was the third time this season the Penguins blew a two-goal lead in the third.

"We didn't defend hard enough," Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan said. "All three goals were seemingly nothing plays that ended up in the back of the net. We had numbers back.

"We've got to defend harder. And we've got to have some predictability in how we defend."

Asked if he knew why his team has lost its grasp on attention to detail on defense at times, Sullivan simply said, "No."

Every Metropolitan Division team that played Saturday lost, meaning the Penguins missed out on a chance to gain ground.

"You feel like you should be able to win those games, and you need to win those games," said Pittsburgh defenseman Ryan Graves, who scored against Vegas.

"It's not about the individual plays and the goals; it's just about the overall theme that we got away from our structure."

—Field Level Media