Fleury hopes to shake off blowout loss to Wings and push Penguins’ season to Game 7

Fleury seeks rebound with Penguins’ season on line

PITTSBURGH — Marc-Andre Fleury’s feel-good week came crashing down under the weight of a suddenly potent power play and some porous defense in front of him.

Not that the Pittsburgh Penguins’ young goalie was on top of his game in a 5-0 loss to the Detroit Red Wings on Saturday night, but he couldn’t really be faulted for the pucks that got past him.

“I know that every guy in that room wants to see him in that net for Game 6,” Penguins coach Dan Bylsma said Sunday. “They believe in him. They’re confident in him, and they know he’s going to respond.”

Fleury and the Penguins can’t afford anything close to a similar performance Tuesday night in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup finals. Detroit leads the series 3-2 and is just one win away from repeating as champion and leaving Pittsburgh on the short end for the second straight season.

“He’s going to be just fine,” forward Bill Guerin said Sunday on the first of two straight off days. “This is a guy who comes in literally fresh every day. Every day is a new day. He’s always got a smile on his face. He’s ready to go. I think he’ll be absolutely fine.

“He’s got a great-type personality to let things just roll off his shoulders and refocus and have fun with it.”

There were no smiles in the visiting dressing room at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena on Saturday after the Penguins were routed by the Red Wings. Fleury didn’t make it out of the second period, when he allowed four goals.

Overall, Fleury was touched for five goals on 21 shots — including three tallies by the Red Wings on a suddenly rejuvenated power play that produced just once in 10 tries in the first four games of the series.

“He’s going to bounce back. He’s a good goalie,” defenseman Kris Letang said. “He has a lot of competitor in him and that’s good. We know that he’s going to be back and he’s going to be good. He has a lot of time to forget about it. It’s going to be a new game.”

Fleury gave up six goals in a pair of 3-1 losses to open the series in Detroit. Some funny bounces off the end boards and other bad breaks made him look worse, but he was strong in stopping 64 of 68 in beating the Red Wings at home in Games 3 and 4.

He had started to outplay Detroit counterpart Chris Osgood. until the lopsided loss Saturday. Fleury got words of encouragement from captain Sidney Crosby to keep his head up after he was yanked with 4:20 left in the second period.

“They won, they did a good job. We got frustrated,” Fleury said. “A loss is a loss. We lost and now we move on.

“It’s going to be good to have a couple of days to regroup and see what happens.”

The Red Wings carried a 1-0 lead into the second period of Game 5, after Dan Cleary shot a puck through the legs of Penguins defenseman Brooks Orpik and past a screened Fleury.

Detroit doubled its lead 1:44 into the second on Valtteri Filppula’s goal and made it 3-0 at 6:11 when Niklas Kronwall went through three Penguins in front and scored the first of the Red Wings’ three power-play goals in the period.

Brian Rafalski added a man-advantage tally at 8:26, with a hard drive from above the right circle that also found its way through traffic, and Henrik Zetterberg ended Fleury’s night at 15:40.

Mathieu Garon stopped all eight shots he faced over the final 24-plus minutes in his first action of the playoffs

“It wasn’t his fault, the situation we were in,” Bylsma said of Fleury. “It was the situation of pucks getting by him and hitting sticks and power-play goals. It was a situation where taking him out was a chance to give him a break and give our team a bit of a wakener — get a new guy in there and see if that would spark us to get focused on playing the game better.

“Marc is the guy who is going in for Game 6. We believe in him. I know he’s the type of guy who is going to be ready to go for Game 6. He’s going to be focused, and he’s going to want to go out there and play the best game of the series.”

Fleury, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2003 NHL draft, is only 24 and has shown glimpses of being worthy of such a high selection. He has already reached the Stanley Cup finals twice in four seasons.

The only problem is he has run into the machinelike Red Wings both times.

His numbers in these playoffs are respectable. Fleury is 14-8 with a 2.76 goals-against average and a .904 save percentage. He had played every postseason minute this year until getting replaced Saturday.

“He’s been through a lot in his career,” forward Max Talbot said. “He’s got a great character. I’m sure he’s going to be ready for the next game. We’ll chit chat. He can be too hard on himself. He had some pretty bad breaks out there. Just forget about it.”