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Opening night preview Penguins vs Lightning

October 12, 2021, 11:55 AM ET [245 Comments]
Ryan Wilson
Pittsburgh Penguins Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
Opening night is here and the Penguins are busy making roster moves to maximize their LTIR space and have made a new signing.



The Boyle signing felt inevitable and is now official. He will make 750k on a one-year deal. The Penguins had to wait to put Malkin on LTIR in order to make the signing because they only had about 122k in cap space before it. Malkin will be out for a while so the team has some time to figure out the cap when he eventually returns and adds 9.5M back on the books.

Anthony Angello and Drew O’Connor are back up after a brief cap related demotion.

Here are the lines which are noticeably missing Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Jake Guentzel

Heinen-Carter-Rust
Zucker-Rodrigues-Kapanen
McGinn-Blueger-Simon
O’Connor-Boyle-Lafferty

Not ideal to say the least. To the point where I don’t think I would take a lot away from tonight’s result. This isn’t a reflection of the true roster.

On defense you have the following

Dumoulin-Letang
Matheson-Marino
Pettersson-Ruhwedel

The Matheson-Marino pairing sticks out because it wasn’t nearly as good as the Pettersson-Marino pairing.



Personally, I would go with Pettersson-Marino, but perhaps this is the Penguins tipping their hand that they don’t plan on having Pettersson the entire season and want Marino to get used to playing with Matheson, who’s contract is probably immovable.

UPDATE 12:39 PM

Mike Matheson will NOT be playing tonight. He is day to day




Special teams:



Here are Tampa Bay’s likely line combinations
Ondrej Palat - Brayden Point - Nikita Kucherov
Alex Killorn - Anthony Cirelli - Steven Stamkos
Corey Perry - Ross Colton - Mathieu Joseph
Patrick Maroon - Pierre-Edouard Bellemare - Taylor Raddysh

Victor Hedman - Jan Rutta
Ryan McDonagh - Erik Cernak
Mikhail Sergachev - Zach Bogosian
****
Sidney Crosby was scheduled for an interview at halftime last night during Monday Night Football until the Jon Gruden news broke. Even if it didn’t go down at halftime it already shows that ESPN will be promoting the stars of the league way better than NBC ever did. One thing ESPN does better than anything else is self-promotion of the properties they own which is why you didn’t see hockey on the network for the last 15 or so years. Hockey is back on ESPN and over time we will see more crossover promotions. In the interview Crosby talked about being ready to play in a “week or two” and he also “hopes to play at least four more seasons” which coincidentally brings him to the end of his current contract.

Thanks for reading!
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