With one game left to go in the 2023-24 regular season, the Pittsburgh Penguins have been eliminated from the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs. The Detroit Red Wings and the Washington Capitals both won their games on Tuesday, rendering it impossible for Pittsburgh to pass them in the standings and possibly squeak into the second Wild Card spot in the Eastern Conference. It is the second straight season wherein the Penguins will play a meaningless regular season finale, with no hope of making an impact on their own fate or even the fate of their opponents, on the road against a New York Islanders team which is already locked into a third place finish in the Metropolitan Division. They will finish the season 19th or 20th in the NHL, depending on if they are passed by the Minnesota Wild in the standings. This would only be relevant to Pittsburgh if they had a first round pick in June’s Entry Draft, but instead that pick will go to the San Jose Sharks per the terms of the Erik Karlsson trade. (Actually, we won’t know until the actual lottery if the first round pick goes to San Jose; last year the lottery was on May 8. Depending on if the Wild pass them in the standings, Pittsburgh could have a ~3.2% chance at the 4-6 overall pick, or a ~4.2% chance at the 3-5 overall pick. So, if you want a reason to be marginally more interested in hockey tomorrow, the Wild host the Seattle Kraken tomorrow night. But that would require rooting for the Penguins to lose tonight.)

I will have a postmortem out in the next week or so. We’ll see what comes in the aftermath of this failure of a season, but for now the Penguins do still have some hockey left to play, as pointless as it is. Maybe they will lose and make it literally pointless.