The stat that stands out, obviously, is giving up eight goals on 36 shots in 102:16.

Before that, it took Pekka Rinne 249 minutes and 131 shots to give up eight goals. Which is why the Nashville Predators walked over Anaheim in the Western Conference Final. And Rinne’s struggles are also why they are now down 0-2 in a Stanley Cup Final in which they should at least be tied.

I said in the Countdown earlier this week that I wasn’t ready to say Rinne had turned back into a pumpkin because of a bad Game 1. He is very much a pumpkin now, whether you want to call it just a two-game blip or anything else. You can’t be this bad for two Cup Final games in a row and expect anyone to be sympathetic to what could be a brief slump. At this time of year, brief slumps are deadly.

[Follow Puck Daddy on social media: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr]

And that’s especially true because the team in front of him has made his job incredibly easy in these two road games, only for him to unnecessarily complicate things and put them in a huge hole.

One need only look at the raw the numbers to see the myriad problems Rinne has caused. Even if you adjust for score and venue, the Predators have attempted nearly 60 percent of all 5-on-5 shots in the series, and more than that in actually getting shots on goal. Nashville also controlled 64-plus percent of the scoring chances and almost 69 percent of the high-danger chances.

And yet they have conceded nine goals, eight of which are on Rinne’s account, while scoring just four themselves. It’s staggering how badly things have gone.

The Rinne issue would be bad even if the goalie at the other end weren’t playing ridiculously well. But Matt Murray has been excellent. And so now the Predators face a situation in which they need to make up what has been a one-hundred-sixty point difference in save percentage between the two series’ starters. That number again: Pittsburgh’s save percentage is plus-.160 relative to Nashville. Inexplicable.

Well, it’s not “inexplicable” inexplicable.

You watch the games, you see where things go wrong. In the first game you could explain away the majority of the goals he allowed, if you were inclined to do so. Not so much in the second. And regardless of whether you want to forgive his Game 1 performance, that first Jake Guentzel goal put all those thoughts to bed.

So too did Guentzel’s second, which was the kind of rebound you would have thought goalies would have stopped allowing in about 1991. However, to some extent so too was the third Pittsburgh goal, which went in off a defender who happened to be in roughly the same spot. Makes you wonder if the Penguins coaches saw something in how Rinne dealt with low angle shots from the right wing. It could also be a coincidence, but given how blatant the shot for the outside pad was on the Game 2 goal like this, I’m not so sure.

The third goal in Game 2 was also a bounce-in off a defender, and the fourth was just an unstoppable Evgeni Malkin shot.

(No coincidence, I’m sure, that it’s Roman Josi getting exposed. His defensive deficiencies have been fairly well-known dating back to his days with Shea Weber, because both were inclined to accede the blue line to attackers in hopes of turning the puck over closer to the net with hits in Weber’s case and stickwork in Josi’s. Of the seven 5-on-5 goals Nashville allowed in the series so far, Josi has been on the ice for four. That, too, probably isn’t a coincidence.)

In the end, you can see where the Predators’ potential deficiency in net — Rinne was the reason I think a lot of people picked Chicago to beat Nashville in the first round — is finally being exploited.

If you want to say the Penguins have figured Rinne out, I don’t know if that’s fair. But he’s certainly lending plenty of help to the back-to-back Cups cause.

View photos

Story continues