Penguins beat Flyers 3-1 throughout opener.

PHILADELPHIA -- Flyers fans fans treated the NHL's delayed opening day as if it were a playoff game, showing up in record numbers for enthusiastic pre-game partying and revelry.


The problem was their team performed like it was a preseason game, looking slightly rusty in a 3-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 1 of the league's abbreviated 48-game schedule

"It wasn't one of our best games (either)," Penguins left wing Pascal Dupuis conceded. "But I think it's going to be like this around the league for a while. You just have to play well defensively."
The Penguins scored on two of their first five shots against Philadelphia goalie Ilya Bryzgalov, and then rode a 26-save performance by goalie Marc-Andre Fleury to beat the team that eliminated them from the playoffs eight months ago.

The win was the 227th of Fleury's career, passing Tom Barrasso for the team record.

"A disappointing start, for sure," Flyers forward Scott Hartnell said. "I don't know if you want to chalk it up to not playing for eight months, but we didn't have any legs that first period."
Dupuis agrees with league-wide assertion that goaltending will be crucial in the early going as players try find their sharpness and teams try to get in sync after a six-day training camp and no preseason games.

"We saw tonight that the (Flyers) kept coming and coming," Dupuis said. "It wasn't pretty, but we blocked some shots and the saves were there."
The Penguins killed all five Philadelphia power play opportunities, including two in the final six minutes.

"(Fleury) was solid," Crosby said. "It's not an easy place to play, and they have some dangerous players. He did a great job of hanging in there for us and making some big saves. Their power play gets a lot of chances no matter how good our penalty killers play."

Tyler Kennedy opened the scoring with a power play goal at 4:40 of the first period with defensemen Paul Martin and Matt Niskanen each drawing an assist.

"We knew we weren't going to come in here and like it's Game 6 of the playoffs," Penguins winger James Neal said. "We knew we'd be scrambling."

Lower than about three min's after, Evgeni "Geno" Malkin played a new draw back in order to David Neal, exactly who rifled the puck beyond Flyers goalie Bryzgalov to generate that a new 2-0 video game.

"In terminology connected with executing, I think we can easily advance, inches said Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, exactly who had about three photos in online without the need of factors. "But We imagined we all still performed an attractive excellent employment of developing positive we all were having to worry about the facts, not necessarily trying to complete a lot of. inches.

The experience looks like exactly what the primary preseason sport appears like, having equally groups experiencing functionality degrees which ebbed and also ran. These two groups include an amount of artistic participants, but this kind of sport had been similar to the finger-painting than a work of art.
This Penguins as well as Flyers tend to be excited competitors, as well as the two squads tried using to embrace that competition. There was clearly the mixed seventy seven visitors between the a pair of squads, including 7 every single coming from Pittsburgh's He Cooke as well as Philadelphia's Zac Rinaldo.