The Pittsburgh Penguins have been outplayed so definitively in their best-of-seven playoff series against the Philadelphia Flyers that they could lose it in four games.

Thanks to the officials hurting the cause, the Penguins have basically lost it in just three.

The Pens are now down 3-0 after a 5-2 defeat in Philadelphia on Wednesday night. It was a game that will be better remembered for its callback to that Gong Show Game 3 of the 2012 series between these two franchises than for the latest example of Flyers dominance in 2026.

In that contest 14 years ago, there were 158 combined penalty minutes in a game that the officials had no hope of controlling.

On Wednesday, it was the officials who helped create the chaos that resulted in 25 total penalties and 50 penalty minutes between the clubs.

The hockey Yakety Sax routine began late in the first period with Pittsburgh up 1-0, their only lead of the series so far. That goal came on a power play after what had been the only penalty of the game, nearly 19 minutes in.

At the 18:47 mark, though, prior to a Penguins offensive zone faceoff, Philadelphia’s Garnet Hathaway skated toward his position in front of Penguins center Sidney Crosby. He nonchalantly spun his stick and smacked Crosby in the face as the Pittsburgh captain was hunched over, moving in to take the draw. Crosby went down to the ice holding his face.

Accidental or not, Hathaway got thrown into the penalty box for high-sticking, and Crosby was busted for embellishing.

Let’s be honest about what happened there. The refs knew they had to put Hathaway in the box because Crosby went down, and everyone was going to see why. They felt it was accidental, and they knew Philadelphia’s bench and crowd were going to lose their minds, so they didn’t want to give the Penguins the advantage. Hence, they dinged Crosby for a dive.

“We don’t have a single embellishment all year. Sidney Crosby doesn’t have an embellishment in 21 seasons,” Penguins coach Dan Muse said after the game. “So the stick is in his face. They take both of them? I disagree on that strongly.”

In other words, the officials tried to tamp down the situation by evening it out, but they just made matters worse because both teams were now ticked off. The easier thing to do would’ve been not to assess Hathaway, say it was an accident and play on.

The decision backfired because both teams came out in the second period in a bad mood.

Just over 90 seconds after the first intermission, the officials again decided to toss two guys at once when they put Pens defenseman Kris Letang and Philly forward Travis Konecny into the box after a tie-up.

No harm in that decision, but, your honor, this goes to motive for what happened next.

At the 4:33 mark, a giant fracas erupted. The main combatants were Konecny and Penguins winger Bryan Rust. Konecny started the brawl by elbowing Rust, then kicked at him (twice) toward the end of the fray.

Amid the rest of the dust-up, four additional players from each team got penalties. Players were practically sitting on each other’s laps in the penalty boxes.

Yet somehow, Rust walked away with an additional two-minute penalty, and the Flyers ended up scoring on the ensuing power play.

“I got elbowed,” Rust said. “So I just kind of locked him up, took him to the ground. He tried to kick me, threw a couple punches back and forth. Not sure why I got an extra two (minutes).”

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Then, in an act of pure officiating comedy, less than a minute later, the referees called a penalty on the Flyers for a cross-check against Nick Seeler when he hit Crosby.

Fellas, if your unending quest is to constantly keep things even, just don’t give Rust the extra two minutes out of the melee. Problem solved before there is a problem. Now you are trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

The encore belly laugh from an officiating standpoint was when they matched up an Evgeni Malkin cross-check against Philadelphia’s Matvei Michkov with an embellishment to Michkov.

You know, just to make the score sheet look balanced.

After the game, Crosby was was confused by some of the officiating decisions.

“I don’t know how Rusty ends up with the extra out of all that,” Crosby said after the game. “I don’t know how I end up with embellishment.”

The biggest problem for the Penguins is how they responded to Trevor Zegras’ power-play goal after the Rust-Konecny scrum.

The roof caved in. Philly scored twice more in the second period after that incident.

“The game turned into a bit of a WWE match in the second period,” Rust said. “They kind of fed off that, and they were able to capitalize.”

Following the game, Muse couldn’t talk his way around the ripple effect of how that donnybrook was adjudicated, and how the goal that followed changed the momentum of the game.

“We get the extra penalty where that changed everything. And then it took a long time to get it all sorted out,” Muse insisted. “I’m not going to be here making excuses. There’s plenty that we can do better. But that definitely factored into the feel of that period and the game.”

The easy thing to say from a Philadelphia standpoint is that the Flyers handled the temperature of the night better than the Penguins did, and that they suckered the easily instigated Pens into scraps instead of worrying about catching up in the game.

That’s a completely accurate point.

But Muse didn’t really want to hear it, claiming the Flyers’ baiting tactics are too repetitive to ignore.

“(The Penguins) have to be in a position to defend themselves. It’s after almost every whistle or shot,” Muse said. “So we’ve got to focus on what we can control. We want to play between whistles. I think our guys were working to do that, but it’s after every time. “

To continue Rust’s WWE point, the Penguins are down on the mat after getting hit by a steel chair. Now the Flyers are on the top rope, ready to perform their finishing move.

Even if the Penguins can kick out of it and get this series back to Pittsburgh as they did in 2012, they’ll be pinned soon enough.