Good The Bad and The Ugly
This Penguins season has had many ups and downs. The best way to describe this is by categorizing it into sections.
The Good:
The Penguins started the New Year off strong winners of 6 streak after the Christmas break. In those wins they’ve scored at least 4 goals and in most games held their opponents to just one goal. New addition Egor Chinakhov also seemed to make a good impression during the run and even got his first on a breakaway against Detroit. Goalie Stuart Skinner seems to of found his game as since December 30th he has posted multi .940+ save percentage games and has only allowed one single goal in each of his starts. The team as a whole has overachieved by a lot and find themselves only one point out of a playoff spot. It is looking like the present path of the Penguins is a competitive rebuild.
The Bad:
The injury bug has continued to hurt the team as players can’t seem to get healthy. They lost Malkin for weeks before he eventually returned, they lost Lizotte recently, and just over the weekend they lost Rust for 2 games. That’s it right? It can’t get any worse than that for injuries right? Wrong. Yesterday morning the team announced that Erik Karlsson would be put on injured reserve and would be reevaluated in 2 weeks. Karlsson who has had an amazing bounce back season for the Penguins will certainly be missed and the hope is they can rely on strong defense and goal tending to carry them to points in the meantime. Ben Kindel who has had an amazing rookie season for a 18 year old rookie has gone dry with now going 18 games with only one goal. Rutger and Kovinuen got sent down to the AHL and Harrison Brunicke got sent back to finish the season in juniors and likely will return to Wilkes Barrie when the junior’s season is over. The prospects have good futures but are not NHL ready yet and it is a little concerning for someone like Rutger who many expected to be playing consistent top 6 minutes this year in the NHL. He’s suffered injuries throughout the season including one recently. Hopefully though the time in the AHL and NHL allows them to continue to grow and be ready for next year.
The Ugly:
The Penguins have gone flat. After a promising 6 game winning streak many wondered if they would ever lose again. Well that question was answered very quickly on Saturday night. In what was a playoff like atmosphere at PPG with thousands of excited fans watching the Penguins only managed to score a single goal and lost to the Flames. They then would continue the scoring struggles by getting shutout in Boston. Can’t get any worse right? Wrong. They continued these struggles yesterday against Tampa where they were held scoreless for most of the game. Malkin was able to force overtime with the goalie pulled he shot a perfect shot low blocker in the high slot. In overtime the Penguins would have many opportunities to win the game but couldn’t get anything to go. The clock ran out and we went to a shootout. The word shootout should be a word that many Penguins fan’s fear as they have only won a single shootout this entire season. Rakell started off the shootout with a shot that got saved and Tampa then scored on their shot. Crosby was next up where he tried something different from his normal move but he failed to even get a shot on during the shootout. Silovs was able to keep the Penguins in it on Tampa’s second shot giving Egor Chinakhov a chance to give the Penguins a glimpse of hope. He buried it 5 hole on a wicked wrister. However it was Kucherov who ended the game beating Silovs and extended the Penguins losing streak to 3.
Reasons for hope:
Despite being losers of their past three games, they have been playing very good hockey. It’s weird to say as how can you be playing good but losing? They are playing dedicated defensive hockey for the most part despite still giving up the occasional breakaway here and there. They just can’t score. That will likely come though as they have too much fire power offensively for this lack of goals to continue. The metro has started to slow down a tad and it’s a great opportunity if they can find a way to stack together more points they can start to climb.
