It’s important to keep in mind that the Pittsburgh Penguins were supposed to rise again this season because of their power play.
That hasn’t happened.
Will they sink because it stinks?
They might. They have so far, anyway.
A 2-1 overtime loss to the Philadelphia Flyers at Wells Fargo Center on Monday night dropped the Penguins to 3-4-3 since a five-game winning streak in November. They’ve allowed only 25 goals, their goaltenders combining to post a .920 save percentage over that span. Five of their seven losses have come by a goal.
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Sure, a deep dive into each shift probably would show other warts that have kept the Penguins from capitalizing on a run of strong goaltending.
They afforded the Flyers enough odd-man rushes over the past two games to turn coach Mike Sullivan’s hair completely gray. Evgeni Malkin looks to have exhausted himself trying to prop up Reilly Smith, who is without a goal in 14 games and Drew O’Connor has ascended into the Penguins’ top six because of injuries and lack of prominent scoring depth.
Smith was one of general manager Kyle Dubas’ celebrated acquisitions this past summer. The other, Erik Karlsson, was to make an even greater impact on the Penguins. But of late, he seems to have abandoned adhering to Sullivan’s system in favor of doing whatever he wants on the ice — and that appears to include not shooting while also making a lot of head-scratching decisions with or without the puck on his stick blade.
Karlsson hasn’t been a bust. His analytics are strong.
He hasn’t helped the power play, and his chance-taking is a lot more problematic when the Penguins can’t count on advantage-scoring to pad leads. This game against the Flyers was a microcosm of that dangerous dynamic.
The only really good things about the Penguins since their winning streak have been the play of goalies Tristan Jarry and Alex Nedeljkovic, and the five-on-five dominance by captain Sidney Crosby’s top line. Crosby scored the Penguins’ only goal against the Flyers. As tracked by Natural Stat Trick, Nedeljkovic made 30 saves, including 16 of 17 mid-to-high danger shots.
But, come on, this game, just as the others over the past four weeks, was about a power play that has become harrowing. The Penguins were out-shot on their power-play chances, 4-1. Nedeljkovic made Grade-A saves on three of the Flyers’ short-handed shots, and the other was a solid B-plus.
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A minus-3 in shot differential on the power play has to be rock bottom for these Penguins, right?
“Everybody who’s on that unit, been on that unit, thinking about that unit, coaching that unit, is really upset with how things are going,” Bryan Rust said. “We’re trying our best to get going, and things aren’t going. So, we got to just keep working.”
Hey, it’s not as though the NHL rules allow for clubs to decline power-play opportunities. It’s an open question as to whether the Penguins are obligated to send five players onto the ice for a power play.
Could Sullivan send out four skaters, borrow a line from Gene Hackman’s Norman Dale in the high-school basketball movie “Hoosiers” and tell the referee, “My team’s on the ice”?
Worth a shot. Nothing else is working. Or even coming close.
Against the Flyers, Karlsson — perceived as the singular fix for a power play that had fallen from its customary top-10 position in recent seasons — was moved to the left side in favor of Kris Letang running center point. The idea wasn’t too outside the box, even though Karlsson said he has never before played the left side on a power play.
Letang had worked the center point on the Penguins’ power plays for more than a decade. Sullivan had to be hoping returning Letang to that spot would ease any tension being felt by Crosby and Malkin, and that perhaps the Penguins’ famed “Big Three” could together bring some actual power when on the advantage.
Nope.
On a shortened power play in the third period, Karlsson was back at center point, passing back and forth with Malkin, to his right. At first glance, they resembled players warming up before a practice. Upon closer inspection, it became clear Karlsson’s passes were not in the wheelhouse for Malkin to rip a one-timer.
So, instead, nothing happened.
Literally. Nothing. And that qualified as progress because at least the Flyers weren’t more of a threat to score than the Penguins on that particular advantage.
Karlsson can’t feed Malkin proper for the one-timer. That’s part of the PP problem.
— Rob Rossi (@Real_RobRossi) December 5, 2023
The Flyers didn’t win the game there and then. The verdict was all but determined, though.
That verdict was important, as it was Saturday night in Pittsburgh. Instead of gaining four points on the Flyers and moving into third place in the Metropolitan Division, the Penguins finished their home-and-home three points behind Philadelphia — and fifth in a congested Eastern Conference wild-card race.
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No, they are not doomed to miss the postseason for a second consecutive year after qualifying for 16 consecutive Stanley Cup playoffs. However, on pace for only 85 points, the Penguins probably need at least a handful of small winning streaks, and possibly a big one, to comfortably make the playoffs.
What’s the difference in how they make it so long as they make it?
Uh, theirs is the league’s oldest roster. Scrambling merely to get into the playoffs is likely to empty the gas tanks of veterans such as Crosby, Malkin, Letang, etc.
Four of their next five games are on the road, where they’ll face opponents either ahead of or competing with them for wild-card spots. This is no suggestion the next couple of weeks will make or break the Penguins, but there aren’t a lot of reasons for optimism — other than their being better away from than in Pittsburgh this season.
Letang suggested after a home loss to the Flyers on Saturday that once the power play gets going, it’s going to take off. Without a goal in 11 games, it increasingly looks likelier the Penguins will challenge the NHL’s expansion era low point for power-play futility — 16 consecutive games without an advantage goal, set by the Cleveland Barons in 1977-78 — than transform into Mario Lemieux-led units that scored like it was no big thing in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Again, the Penguins were supposed to rise because of their power play. Instead, they’re inching close to a defunct organization’s woeful claim to infamy.
That wasn’t supposed to happen, either.
“We have to find a way to create our own chances,” Karlsson said. “With the team that we have here, we should be able to do that. Throughout the course of the season so far, we have not.”
(Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
