Jared McCann, Brian Dumoulin, Justin Schultz, Brandon Tanev, Jamie Olekssiak, Ron Francis, Jason Botterill… all Kraken players or Clubhouse staff. Western teams love our castoffs. What does that say about the Pens organization? Whatever you want to read into it, Seattle, and just recently Vancouver, have enough X-Pens players and staff to field a respectable, almost entire, team. Very interesting.

The Pens made the decision to move this scheduled game from an original 6pm start time up to a 1pm start time to make it possible for Steeler fans to be able to see both the Pens game and the also the rescheduled Steelers/Bills Wild Card Playoff game. That was very Canadian of them.

More than 2 feet of snow fell in upstate New York over the weekend forcing the NFL and the NY Governor to adjust the game from Sunday at 1PM to Monday at 4:30pm. Governer Hochul mentioned in her press conference that “Steeler fans should stay home and watch on tv to be ‘safe’ and also… because the Steelers were going to have a rough time against the Bills anyway.” Boy do I hope we can make that beotch eat a big bucket of “extra spicy” Buffalo patties for that statement.

All that being said we’re hoping that the Pens can put together a good game against a team that is undefeated in January. Beating the Knights, Sens, Sabres, Caps and Blue Jackets over the last two weeks by a combined score of 23-9. Oh, and they are currently on a 9 game win streak also winning the last 4 games they played in December against the Kings, Ducks, Flames and the Flyers. Needless to say, it’s time they lost one, and that happens today.

9 game win streak notwithstanding…these guys just aren’t THAT good. Their leading scorer is defenceman Vince Dunn 8g/27a. McCann leads the team with 16g and he’s currently cemented on the 4th line. Joey Dacord is having a decent year in the net 13-5-0 / 2.29ga / .923 sv% but let’s be real…these guys were 10-14-9 and drowning on the bottom of the Pacific before this current 9 game run. What I’m trying to say here is the Pens need to win this game in regulation. Some secondary scoring and a good goalie outing is in order for today. 4 of the last 6 game we’ve played have been 1 goal losses… we did enough of that last year and see where that got us. DANCE OFF !

HAPPY MLK DAY … LET’S GO PENS