Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby celebrates with Jake Guentzel after he scored his 500th NHL career goal against the Philadelphia Flyers in the first period Tuesday night in Pittsburgh. Keith Srakocic/Associated Press

PITTSBURGH — Sidney Crosby scored his 500th goal and Pittsburgh teammate Kris Letang capped a late rally to lift the Penguins past the Philadelphia Flyers 5-4 in overtime Tuesday night.

Crosby became the 46th player in NHL history to reach the 500-goal milestone when he beat Carter Hart from the goal line on the power play at 16:34 of the first period to give Pittsburgh a 2-1 lead. Crosby’s teammates poured over the bench in a raucous celebration after the 34-year-old joined Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux as the only Penguins in franchise history with 500 career goals.

Still, Pittsburgh needed far more than its captain to fend off the last-place Flyers.

Jake Guentzel and Chad Ruhwedel scored 18 seconds apart in the third period to erase a two-goal deficit, and Letang’s wrist shot by Hart 31 seconds into OT gave the Penguins their fourth straight win.

Dominik Simon also scored for Pittsburgh, and Casey DeSmith stopped 23 shots as the Penguins stayed atop the Metropolitan Division by sending the Flyers to their third consecutive loss.

Scott Laughton, Nick Seeler and Justin Braun scored during a second-period outburst as the Flyers took command. Hart finished with 29 saves but lost his third straight start when he couldn’t get a handle on Letang’s winner. Claude Giroux also scored for Philadelphia, which saw itself on the wrong end of a signature Crosby moment once again.

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Crosby has tormented the Flyers with regularity for most of his 16 seasons. With the Penguins on the man advantage late in the first period, he perched himself along the goal line, took a cross-ice feed from longtime teammate Evgeni Malkin and fired a wrist shot to Hart’s short side that handcuffed the goalie and smacked into the back of the net.

The three-time Stanley Cup winner and future Hall of Famer — who refused to talk about reaching such rarified air before it happened — broke into a wide smile as his parents and the rest of the sellout crowd erupted.

Perhaps it was fitting the primary assist went to Malkin — the franchise’s other pillar for the better part of the last two decades — and that it came against the Flyers. A full 10% (50) of Crosby’s career goals have come against Philadelphia.

SABRES 6, ISLANDERS 3: Victor Olofsson scored twice, including the go-ahead goal with 2:55 left in the game, and Buffalo won at home.

Alex Tuch added a goal and assist for Buffalo. Tage Thompson, Kyle Okposo, Henri Jokiharju also scored. Dylan Cozens had three assists and Peyton Krebs had two. Dustin Tokarski made 30 saves.

Kyle Palmieri scored twice for the Islanders, who finished out a four-game trip on a three-game skid. Anders Lee had a goal and an assist, and Ilya Sorokin stopped 35 of 39 shots.

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LIGHTNING 6, DEVILS 3: Victor Hedman, Nikita Kucherov and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare scored in a 3:04 span of the third period, and visiting Tampa Bay rallied from an early two-deficit to beat New Jersey.

Steven Stamkos and Alex Killorn had scored in a 41-second span late in the second period to tie the game at 3. Pat Maroon also scored for the Lightning, and Andrei Vasilevskiy made 22 saves as Tampa Bay improved to 8-2-1 in its last 11.

Rookie Dawson Mercer had a goal and two assists for New Jersey, which has lost 9 of 11. Jack Hughes and Yegor Sharangovich added a goal and an assist. Jon Gillies of South Portland made 24 saves before being lifted after the sixth goal.

BLUES 5, SENATORS 2: Vladimir Tarasenko scored twice and had an assist, and St. Louis won at Ottawa.

Tarasenko’s first goal put the Blues up 2-1 in the second period, and his second was an empty-netter that came with about two minutes left in a game that was well in hand by then. He now has 18 goals this season.

NOTES

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KRAKEN: The Seattle Kraken say they will make NHL history during Thursday night’s game against Winnipeg when play-by-play announcer Everett Fitzhugh and analyst JT Brown team up to form the first all-Black television broadcast crew to call an NHL game.

Fitzhugh and Brown will appear on ROOT Sports Northwest. Fitzhugh is Seattle’s radio play-by-play announcer but will be moving over to the television side for one night while regular TV announcer John Forslund works the national broadcasts for Vegas and Colorado on TNT.

Seattle senior vice president of marketing and communications Katie Townsend said the team had planned for Forslund to miss a small number of games for national broadcast duties during the season and have Fitzhugh step in. She said having Fitzhugh and Brown team up during Black History Month adds even more significance.

Fitzhugh was Seattle’s first broadcast hire in the summer of 2020 after working in the ECHL.

Brown retired after playing parts of seven seasons with Tampa Bay, Anaheim and Minnesota. He last played during the 2018-19 season.


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