There isn’t much of a debate to be had about last night’s game. It was one of the worst performances of the season by the Penguins. The Blackhawks were a team spiraling out of control losing the night before to the Jets and flying back home in the middle of the night while the Penguins were resting. The biggest crime of the night was losing the headline “Chicago can’t shake the Rust” as Bryan Rust broke his slump by scoring three times against the Blackhawks.

The Penguins elected to keep Derick Brassard up with the Crosby line and use Phil Kessel with Evgeni Malkin. They are all in on being top heavy at the moment. Bryan Rust will hopefully chip in more offensively, but he isn’t going to be potting three goals a night in his bottom six role. Naturally, with a top heavy team when the stars aren’t producing they are going to start to catch some of the blame. The margin for error becomes smaller and smaller because if the top six doesn’t produce then the team likely loses. We’ve seen this before. During the later stages of the Bylsma era it was very popular to blame Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin while letting the lesser players off the hook.

Evgeni Malkin did not play well against the Blackhawks, but I’ve seen this fish before. The best players in the league all go through cold streaks. The cold streaks are more noticeable when the depth doesn’t compliment them. When you look at how the lines are structured and how limited the Penguins defensemen are as a group any stretch of underperformance from a player like Malkin will stick out like a sore thumb. It’s obvious that Malkin is still one of the best centers in the league. He will not stay in a cold streak forever. This is the natural process of an 82 game season.

Against the 31st place team in the league Jack Johnson had a cool CF 4 CA 17 performance. His pairing with Marcus Pettersson had one brilliant night against one of the worst teams in hockey when the pairing went CF 12 CA 0 in 8:26 together against Ottawa. The other 50 minutes together they’ve been a mess. They have been on the ice for 44 shot attempts for and 60 against for a percentage of 42.3. Super small samples like the Ottawa game are toxic. Truth be told I don’t like referencing the 50 minute sample because that isn’t a reasonable size either. It’s disingenuous to use highly volatile samples which is why I haven’t done much statistically so far this NHL season. I don’t think there is any predictive value. Small samples tell you what happened and are limited in forecasting future events. We are getting to the point in the season where samples are growing and certain trends could start to have predictive value.

One of those trends is probably going to tell us what we probably already know. Pittsburgh’s defense isn’t good enough at defending, which could be OK. It will also tell us that they really aren’t that great at moving the puck, which isn’t OK when coupled with the first issue. This has been an issue for quite a while and glossed over because Matt Murray and Marc-Andre Fleury played out of their heads during the 2017 playoff run. Outside of the Justin Schultz acquisition none of the other defensive additions move the needle. Some of them have had spurts of solid play like Daley and Oleksiak, but regression always finds a way with mediocre to bad players who have a larger sample in the league. I am not saying Sergei Gonchar isn’t a good coach. He probably is. I’m saying he isn’t the defensemen whisperer that transforms every single player who dons the Penguins crest (hello Johnson and Hunwick. The Penguins have one very good right defenseman with Letang and a very nice complimentary player for him on the left side in Dumoulin currently. The rest of the bunch toils between acceptable and horrible. The Justin Schultz injury really put a damper on things. He has the proper skill set for what this team is trying to be. Without him they are stuck between a rock (playing defensive) and a hard place (trying to push pace with no puck skills/skating on back end).

There are still trades to be made. There are injured players that will come back. There is still a need to improve the back end. Goaltending isn’t going to save the team like in 2017.

Thanks for reading!

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