SUNRISE, Fla. -- Marc-Andre Fleury won his first eight starts this season, and did it in style.

He allowed two or fewer goals in six of those eight games, and earned five of his victories on the road.

The Penguins had no better player during most of October, and the NHL had few, if any, better goalies then.

But Fleury, who is expected to get the start when the Penguins face Florida at 7:38 tonight at the BankAtlantic Center, stumbled as the month wound down.

He picked up his first loss Oct. 24 against New Jersey, kicking off a stretch during which he dropped 7 of 10 decisions and twice was replaced by backup Brent Johnson.

The second of those was Thursday in Ottawa, when coach Dan Bylsma yanked Fleury after he gave up five goals on 24 shots. The way Fleury responded to it was fairly predictable.

With the sting of the game in Ottawa still fresh, Fleury was brilliant in a 3-2 victory Saturday night in Atlanta. He rejected 31 of 33 shots and made a series of breathtaking stops on Ilya Kovalchuk and Maxim Afinogenov, the Thrashers' most lethal goal-scorers.

"It's not a surprise to me," Bylsma said. "He's come back from bad outings for the team or ones he's not happy with and played really well."

Fleury allowed that, "After a tough loss, it's always good to come back right away," and said that he "felt good in the head and good physically" at Philips Arena.

His teammates noticed. So did the Thrashers.

"We had a lot of chances, but Fleury stood up and made some big saves," said ex-Penguin Chris Thorburn, who ended Fleury's bid for his first shutout of the season with a short-handed goal midway through the third period.

The Thrashers controlled play for much of the rest of the game, but couldn't get another puck past Fleury until just 17.5 seconds remained in regulation. That goal, by Afinogenov, sliced into the Penguins' margin of victory, but came too late to affect the outcome.

Fleury's personal stats, not surprisingly, started to suffer around the time the Penguins' spate of injuries to significant players, particularly veteran defensemen, began.

Defenseman Mark Eaton put forth the very reasonable idea that the patchwork lineup in front of him was responsible for Fleury's troubles after his 8-0 start, but goaltending coach Gilles Meloche suggested yesterday that Fleury was guilty of trying to do too much on his own.

There were no mechanical differences in Fleury's game from the time when he was winning every start to the 3-7 stretch that preceded his victory in Atlanta, Meloche said, but that doesn't mean everything was the same.

"We lost a couple of guys, and you believe you have to save the team," he said. "If you know [Fleury], he believes he can do it, game-in and game-out, all by himself, and it's not going to work that way."

Actually, it almost did on Saturday. Getting a couple of goals from Martin Skoula and another by Evgeni Malkin was critical but Fleury routinely frustrated the Thrashers for the first 49-plus minutes.

Fleury's dominance started 4 1/2 minutes into the game, when he sprawled to deny Slava Kozlov from the left side of the crease, and continued with dazzling glove saves on Kovalchuk and Afinogenov.

"They had some good opportunities," Penguins center Sidney Crosby said. "He was really on top of his game."

And not just when stopping shots.

"He was solid and aggressive and controlling rebounds," Bylsma said. "He was jumping out of the net to play pucks. When they rimmed it in, he plays a lot of pucks and played them very well. He looked sharp in a lot of areas."

Meloche said that Fleury's history shows that the arc his season has followed is pretty much the same one it has been on throughout his career, with a strong start giving way to struggles in the second month.

Fleury recognizes that, and hopes his game in Atlanta will provide a template for future starts.

"It's been a little up-and-down," he said. "I'm just going to try to get a little more consistent."

NOTES -- The Panthers are 8-3-1 since high-scoring forward David Booth got a concussion on a hit from Philadelphia's Mike Richards. ... Florida is 5-0 when tied after two periods.

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