Wilkes Weekly: Murashov bounces back

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins played the same opponent at the same place, to even the same score in both games last week. WBS and Charlotte were on each side of a 5-1 game.

Nick Hart at WBSPenguins.com fills us in on the details.

Friday, Jan. 9 – PENGUINS 5 at Charlotte 1
Four points by Tristan Broz helped spearhead the Penguins’ offense and snap the team’s three-game losing streak. Broz’s linemates, Atley Calvert and Valtteri Puustinen, also had one goal and one assist each. Sergei Murashov made 21 saves.

Saturday, Jan. 10 – PENGUINS 1 at Charlotte 5
The Checkers flipped the script for the first home win in the season series, beating the Penguins by an identical score to Friday. Ryan Graves buried Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s lone goal on the power play with assists to Ville Koivunen and Valtteri Puustinen.

It’s good that Sergei Murashov responded with a win on Friday, it was almost time to have a conversation about the young goalie who had his two worst performances of the season in the prior two outings to this week — Murashov allowed a season-high five goals in each game against Charlotte on 12/30 and Syracuse on 1/3 while getting pulled in each game. Prior to that Murashov had only given up a maximum of three goals in a game, and 12 out of his 14 games he allowed two or less goals. The recent bump in the road looks behind him and more like an aberration but serves as a reminder for his young age and experience level that he still has some experience to gain in the minor league while he grows.

The ironic part might now be some concern about the form of the other goalies on the team, Joel Blomqvist. Blomqvist, who returned from injury and had his season start in mid-November, was lights out immediately — only giving up 10 total goals in his first six appearances this season. His play has slipped a bit as time has gone up (giving up one, two, two, three and four goals over his last five appearances).

Overall the two goalies still carry similarly impressive stats on the season (a 2.10 GAA for Murashov, 2.14 for Blomqvist, a .925 save percentage for Blomqvist and .922% for Murashov), it’s just standing out recently that the performances lately have started to become more scattered between good and bad outings, and it’s become newsworthy when either has a bad outing at all since those have been so few.

The rest of the team, as always, continues to fluctuate. Rafael Harvey-Pinard earned his first call-up of the season to Pittsburgh, then was replaced in the NHL by Tristan Broz just as Broz recorded a four-point game last week, resulting in some yo-yo’ing for the AHL roster go gain and lose their best forward of the moment.

Caleb Jones will shake off the rust on a conditioning stint. Ville Koivunen is back in the AHL, scoring one point (an assist) so far in two games back with WBS. Ryan Graves has again been called back up to Pittsburgh. Matt Dumba continues to hang around.

That’s led to offense by committee this season, no one on Wilkes has more goals than 11 (Broz), who isn’t even with the team now. Nine players have at least six goals on the season, which has come with some surprisingly and perhaps unexpected stints in Northeastern Pennsylvania this season like the departed Danton Heinen.

One thing that Wilkes can depend on despite the changes has been Valtteri Puustinen. In some regards it seems like he just launched his career but Puustinen has been a staple for WBS since 2021-22, other the times he’s been called up to Pittsburgh. Now Puustinen is closing in on some scoring records in franchise history.

Puustinen has scored three more points since the graphic to get up to 170. Second place is Tomas Surovy and Toby Petersen (a pair of great ‘remember some guys’) at 177, which looks to be achievable barring some kind of future transaction. No one’s ever likely to touch Mr. WBS Tom Kostopolous’s career totals for the AHL Pens in a very long time, kinda odd to think of Puustinen as potentially the second most productive WBS Penguin.

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Those tangents aside, WBS has remained comfortably in second place in the division.

This week the Penguins play at Providence tonight, which is always a massive game. Then WBS goes home for the weekend when they’ll host last place Hartford in two games and look to fatten up on some points as a result.