It seems like only yesterday when the draft for the 2007-2008 hockey season had begun and all the teams were looking for a ray of hope for the coming year. Alas, after one fourth of the season is gone, the Pittsburgh Penguins are still on the search.
After last year’s fantastic run, which shoved the Pens into a heated battle with the New Jersey Devils for the top spot in the Atlantic, the same two teams are still fighting over position. Sadly, that spot is for the one who cleans out the bottom floor of the outhouse. Currently, the two teams both have 20 points, the Penguins record of 9-11-2, has them one loss more than their shoveling partners.
What went wrong and is there hope?
There’s always hope when you have players like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Sergi Gonchar and Ryan Whitney on the team and a power play that ranks 11th in the league at 19.6%. The problem may well lie in the fact that most of the production has come from a small core of players. After Crosby, Malkin, Gonchar, Petr Sykora and Ryan Malone, no one else has more than single digit points, and Malone just got his 11th point in the twenty-second game! In addition to that, only five players have a plus/minus rating higher than zero, and two players share a lofty four rating.
And the goaltending has been up and down all season and really isn’t that great either. The tandem of Marc-Andre Fleury and Dany Sabourin rank 26th with a combined 3.09 GAA, and .901 save percentage. When you’re scoring an average of 2.77 goals per game, it leads to losses, do the math. Neither goalie seems to want to take control of not just a game, but to go on a run of good games. Fleury has looked spectacular at times, standing up tall, blocking shots to the corner, throwing out the pads of gold, flashing them like a hip-hop rapper. Then at times he gives up two goals on four shots. It’s toss a shutout here, give up five goals there.
The key word is consistency. It is needed from the scorers to the goalies, to the coaches. Wonder what it would be like if coach Michel Therrien left the lines alone for two weeks so these players got a feel for each other? This team has the players and the style to improve and be in the playoffs again this year. If every game everyone stepped up and played a steady game, made the routine play, and did their job, this team would not be in the spot they are in, looking up at the rear ends of those other teams.
It’s not the best place to be, on the bottom floor of an outhouse. The view really sucks.
