The Penguins begin their four game road trip that will take them from the Rocky Mountains to California. They will start the trip with the weakest of the four teams tonight in Colorado. The two Southern California teams will pose a great challenge. San Jose is a team where you never know what you are going to get.

Here are the teams and where they stand so far this season.



The trade deadline is over and this will be the final roster the Penguins take into the playoffs. The final stretch of the season is going to give a clearer picture of where this Penguins team stands.

Specifically focusing on a team’s Score-Adjusted Fenwick lends itself to somewhat accurate predictive power.

Travis Yost studied the powers of Score-Adjusted Fenwick and the predictive ability in the playoffs

We only have seven years of data available, but the results are impressive. If you simply picked the better Score-Adjusted Fenwick% team in the last 20 games of the regular season, your record since 2008 is 71-33 (68.2%). Since picking the home team in every series would net you a 56% success rate, I'm inclined to believe there's something here.

Also from Travis Yost



And wouldn’t you know it, the Penguins have 20 games left in the regular season. It isn’t the end all be all but something that has a predictive power of ~68% isn’t something to casually toss aside.

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Down on the farm goaltender Matt Murray had a pretty amazing month of February for WB/S

After a month of near perfection, the AHL named Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins goaltender Matt Murray as the CCM/AHL Goaltender of the Month for February.

The award caps a stellar month for the rookie netminder, who allowed just one goal on 110 shots, posting a 0.25 goals-against average, a .991 save percentage and three shutouts.

In 28 games this year Matt Murray has a save percentage of .936 which leads the entire league.

Pretty amazing stuff.

This of course isn’t a large sample size and it remains to be seen if it can translate into the NHL but this is a very nice start.

Stephan Cooper of Eyes On The Prize wrote about the jump that goaltenders face going from the AHL to the NHL and how there isn’t a very strong correlations in save percentages.



I’m willing to bet that dot in the upper left hand corner is Jacob Markstrom.

The relationship between the AHL performance and the NHL performance proved to be pretty much random, which largely mimics the relationship between year Save% in the NHL. Thus while we can conclude that achieving a good save percentage is more difficult in the NHL than the AHL, AHL single season results have little bearing on goaltender Save% in the NHL the following season.

This doesn’t take away from Matt Murray’s AHL success, job well done by him.

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Christian Ehrhoff had symptoms over the weekend and will not be playing in tonight's game. This assures both Lovejoy and Cole will make their Penguins debut.

I am curious to see how the 7th defenseman is when everybody is healthy.

Thanks for reading!

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