The Pittsburgh Penguins are now well and truly out of town after Saturday’s home-like 6-3 win over the Columbus Blue Jackets, starting out in the Canadian prairie to begin their annual excursion to the northwestern reaches of the NHL with tonight’s game against the Edmonton Oilers. The Penguins will actually be playing a series of three back-to-backs: tonight and tomorrow against the Calgary Flames, Friday and Saturday against Vancouver and Seattle, then coming back home for a quick visit from the Boston Bruins next Tuesday before flying out to Buffalo for next Wednesday’s game against the Sabres.
With regards to current state of things, it’s a bit of a whiplash between the quality of teams and their position in the standings: Edmonton is tied for fifth in the Pacific, four points behind Calgary, two behind Seattle, two ahead of Vancouver (which is looking more and more like an absolute train-wreck), six behind Boston and four behind Buffalo. Yes, it’s early, and the standings don’t matter much right now, but it’s interesting to see who’s off to a good start and who’s not. Edmonton is one of the teams not off to a good start, but with a new goaltending tandem in Jack Campbell and Stuart Skinner (who???), it might be just the growing pains of a new season with new personnel.
Pittsburgh will head out on the road without Teddy Blueger, placed on LTIR retroactive to the beginning of the season, but will bring Jake Guentzel, Drake Goo-goo-Caggiula and Sam Poulin with them. If there were any complaints about the fourth line, I suspect they would center (no pun intended) around the absence of Blueger. I mean, there is little else to complain about when the team is racking up six goals per win (Kris Letang’s legendary brain-farts leading to Columbus’ 2-0 lead notwithstanding), so yeah, I guess we could grind our axes against Josh Archibald…oh wait, he scored his first goal of the season to get the Penguins on the board on Saturday…uh, Ryan Poehling?…well, he’s got two points in five games and is a +3, nothing to complain about there really…Brock McGinn?…yeah, but he scored in garbage time on Saturday, maybe that’ll get him going…
Honestly, there’s little worth seriously griping about right now. Pittsburgh has six point-per-game players right now (Crosby showing off with two points-per-game, but also Malkin, Guentzel, Rust, Heinen and Kapanen(!)), and a further five players just off that pace (Carter, Petry, Zucker, Letang, and Pettersson(!)). Besides the aforementioned and typical brainfarts by Letang, the new-look defense might actually be better than any sextet the Penguins have had in recent years. Tristan Jarry is doing great, and hopefully Casey DeSmith will be able to keep up with him. The next six games will be very revealing as far as how the Penguins manage themselves with all the back-to-backs, with DeSmith likely playing half of these games, and maintaining the high standard they’ve set in the first five games. I’m not expecting many six-goal performances, but then again…why not?
