Not a great weekend for the Pittsburgh Penguins. After beating some of the bottom feeders in the Eastern Conference earlier in the week they struggled against some Metropolitan Division competition. They lost 5-2 to the Washington Capitals on Saturday and then 6-2 to the Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday. An aggregate total of 11-4. Really bad any way you slice it.
Nobody is played particularly well for the Penguins and they deserved both results. They were out-attempted at 5v5 76 to 85 even though they played from behind most of the weekend. High-danger chances were not favorable either as they put up 14 to the opposition’s 21. In the two games combined the Penguins as a team had an expected goals of only 39.55%. The fourth worst of the weekend among all teams.
Compounding the issue was the goaltending. Neither goalie is doing a good job right now. Here are the last five starts for each player going from most recent to most distant.
They both have one really good start and then four non-quality starts.
These are total team losses. It is troubling to see on back to back days against good competition. The optics are pretty bad. Hindsight is going to allow us some perspective on this weekend. There are 14 games left in the regular season and barring a horrific collapse the first round of the playoffs. I happen to believe the team will bounce back from these losses, as bad as they were. The team is not as bad as they played. However, they may not hit their ceiling and it is something they need to happen if they have true aspirations of winning it all for the third time in the past five years. The coaching staff is going to have to maximize the ability of the players they have. They need to put players in a position to succeed. This isn’t always easy with so many players coming back from injury. Nick Bjugstad had a rough weekend going CF 6 CA 15. The Johnson-Schultz pairing fared the worst in the shot attempt department. Justin Schultz shares the burden with Jack Johnson. He’s been really bad this year and it is why I suggested using him as a trade chip before the deadline.
The comparison isn’t so much to compliment Ruhwedel as it is to show how bad Schultz has been for 5.5M.
The guy hasn’t had a point at 5v5 since his 18th game of the season. He’s played in 45 games this year. He has three power play assists in the last handful of games, but that isn’t close to being enough to overcome his lack of production at 5v5 and his horrible ability to drive play. This is the Edmonton version of Justin Schultz. The player needs to own some of this, but it shouldn’t come as a shock when you lower his quality of teammate this happens. He is deployment dependent. He either needs a really good partner to play on a second pair or a decent enough depth partner on a sheltered third pairing. He isn’t getting either and the results are what they are. It is obvious the team should move on from him and not give him his next contract. They do need to figure out whether or not they can provide him deployment to squeeze some success out of him at this point because if they aren’t willing to do that then why not play Ruhwedel?
The power play has some goals recently, but I can’t imagine many people think it is a smooth operation at this point. The team is struggling on the breakout and the puck movement is so so if they do earn zone time. This stems from their choice to get rid of Phil Kessel in the offseason. Say what you will about the season Phil is having in Arizona, but the team did not have a good backup plan for losing the player who ran their power play the last three or four seasons. Again, this criticism is not about moving on from Kessel it is about not having any sort of transition plan for the power play. I happen to like the drop pass breakout the Penguins use, when you have proper personnel. They had proper personnel with Kessel. I really liked the balance of having Kessel on the left side in the zone and either Crosby or Malkin on the right side. It kept teams honest. They had no plan to replace the void Kessel would leave on the left side. One reason Kovalchuk was talked about for the Penguins is he would be a great option to fill that spot. Right now Bryan Rust is miscast in the role. When the 5v5 stuff isn’t going well the power play can be a get out of jail free card. This isn’t the case for the Penguins.
The Penguins have the Devils on Tuesday and that isn’t going to be a gimme either
#NJDevils are 11–4-5 since the ASG. 27 points in 20 games. They’ve beaten the 3rd, 4th + 5th-best teams in the NHL. If they keep up this pace, they’ll finish w/86-87 pts. And a lot of time spent this summer trying to determine what was sustainable + what was a small sample spike.
— Corey Masisak (@cmasisak22) March 8, 2020
Thanks for reading!