The Penguins are making their annual trip to Florida to face both the Panthers and the Lightning. Tonight they will be in Sunrise, Florida to take on the Panthers. Pittsburgh is coming off of a loss to Vegas where they played quite well despite not scoring a goal.
There are some injury updates to discuss heading into tonight’s game.
Nick Bjugstad and Bryan Rust have been participants in practice, albeit with non-contact jerseys. They have both made the trip, but Rust is not eligible to play until Saturday at the earliest because of terms of his LTIR placement. It remains to be seen when Bjugstad will make his return. These are promising developments on the injury front.
Jared McCann was a full participant in practice and was back in his second line center role
Brian Dumoulin remains out of commission and my concern would be he got hurt blocking a shot. John Marino will continue to work with Kris Letang and things went really good the last game the team tried it. The Pettersson-Schultz combination appears to be a mainstay and I think that is the proper course of action at this point in time. If they can be average the Malkin line will greatly benefit from this development. I would like to see a Riikola-Gudbranson pairing at some point. Perhaps we see that tonight considering they were willing to scratch Jack Johnson last game before Dumoulin’s last minute exit.
Sidney Crosby has been pointless for the last two games. Whether it is fair to him or not he is going to have to find the scoresheet on a regular basis until the team is back at full strength. Look for him to have a bounce back game in the point column tonight.
Sergei Bobrovsky was Florida’s big offseason acquisition. The signed a seven-year 70M contract with the club this summer. He is already 31 years old! How is he doing so far? Not great! Out of the 27 goalies who have played 200 minutes at 5v5 he is 27th overall with a .867 save percentage. His high-danger save percentage is at .684 which is 24th overall. His delta save percentage (dSv%) is 27th overall at -5.27%. This number shows how he has performed relative to the difficulty of shots he has faced. Being negative is not where you want to be. Basically he should have a .919 5v5 save percentage, but he’s at the aforementioned .867. This contract has a long way to go, but early returns aren’t great and I’m not so sure the late returns are going to be great either. Florida needs Bob to have a Vezina caliber season now. Aging isn’t going to do him any favors.
Thanks for reading!
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