Why The Penguins Aren’t A Borderline Team
(Caveat: Right Now)

The Penguins played a borderline playoff team yesterday and won the game. Granted, they beat the Rangers sans Brendan Shanahan and sans Jaromir Jagr for the third period. Still, the Penguins won the game.

When the U.S. broadcasts on NBC and Versus show the Eastern Conference playoff race and teams fighting to get into the playoffs, at the present moment, they don’t show Pittsburgh as just clawing to get into the final spot. While I am fully aware that the Penguins’ grasp on a playoff spot is anything but guaranteed and tenuous at best until the team actually clinches its first postseason birth since 2001, I wanted to list some of the reasons the Penguins find themselves in their current position.

Lady Luck: The Penguins have endured brief stretches of games with Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby this season. Yet, for the most part, the Penguins’ star players—Crosby, Malkin, Fleury—have stayed healthy. Health matters. The Penguins haven’t lost ludicrous numbers of man-games to injuries, and they haven’t lost significant players (example: Jordan Staal or Sergei Gonchar) to an injury.

4-line Depth: Along with Lady Luck comes the admission that, for the first time in many, many years, the Penguins have the ability to roll 4 lines. Even beyond having the ability to roll4 lines, the Penguins have players very capable of playing a role on the third or fourth line relegated to watching from the press box due to their depth. While I don’t feel like looking up this statistic, Colby Armstrong scored his tenth goal of the season when he scored the OT winner against the Rangers. How many 10-goal scorers do the Penguins have at the moment? How many other teams (I’m guessing you can count them on a single hand) have as many 10-goal scorers?

Superstars: Sidney Crosby is the best player in hockey. Hands-down, period. He scores over a point a game and is slumping—which, granted, he is, for Sidney Crosby. Likewise, Malkin might be a rookie, but he’s already a superstar (albeit a superstar who may not be as consistent as I would prefer). When your 1-2 center combination is the highest scoring in the league, you have something pretty special.

Stars: The Penguins have complementary stars. Someday Jordan Staal might be a superstar himself, but for now I’ll take his league-leading 7 shorthanded goals and his goal total (trailing only Malkin and Crosby) and label him a star. Say what you will for Whitney and Gonchar, but offensively, they’re stars, and they form the second best offensive combination in the entire NHL. (The best combination resides in Anaheim and shares multiple Norris Trophies between them.) Mark Recchi may be 39, but he’s still capable of pulling out that trigger release when necessary. In addition to two superstars, the Penguins have a reliable stable of complementary stars.

Special Teams: The Penguins’ road penalty kill could use some work. Nevertheless, the Penguins’ penchant (ability) to score shorthanded goals cannot be taken lightly. Likewise, the team’s first power play unit, although potent, frequently fails to shoot the puck frequently enough. No matter—the Penguins still have the fifth best power play in the entire NHL. Their special teams help them to win games more frequently that they cause them to lose games—and that’s good.

Team Concept: A graphic was displayed on the national broadcast today that fascinated me. The Penguins have gone on a 5-1-0 tear when Crosby fails to score a point. Prior to these six games, the Penguins had never won a game in which Crosby failed to record a point. While of course the team wants Crosby to score goals, there will be days when he is shadowed. And when Malkin, Staal, or someone else, picks up the slack and the team still wins, you don’t just have a one-line, borderline playoff team. You have a four-line team that has the potential to do some serious damage come the postseason.

Goaltending: I can probably count on one hand the number of games the Penguins have lost this season due to inferior goaltending. Even the best goalies have bad games and get yanked. Goaltending is mental before anything else. And when the goalie can make the key save at the crucial time, for a team like the Penguins,, that is all that is required.

Role Players: It goes along with four-line depth, I suppose, but players know their roles. They know what they are supposed to do, what their roles on the team are, and how they are supposed to contribute—and they strive to contribute in that way. It goes a long way to building team chemistry and unity.

Confidence: The Penguins know they are young. The Penguins know they are talented. The Penguins believe they can win every game. Confidence goes a long way to propelling a team to its’ first postseason birth in several seasons.

For all the above listed reasons, we are not seeing the Penguins flash across the screen when they show the sixth through thirteenth Eastern Conference teams. Most of the borderline playoff teams are missing at least one of the ingredients listed above that the Penguins possess.

Be aware, though—and beware—if one of those ingredients goes awry in the last few weeks of the season, it might not be long before you see the Pens on the list of Eastern Conference teams trying to claw their way into the postseason.


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