Call it a 'measuring stick’ or not, Penguins prep for tough stretch vs. NHL’s top teams
Perhaps it was an ESPN “power ranking” published a few hours earlier that pegged the Pittsburgh Penguins as the sixth-best team in the Eastern Conference.
Or maybe Kris Letang recently had been informed sportsbooks are giving the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers at least twice as good of odds of winning the Stanley Cup as his Penguins.
Whatever it was, it seems as if Letang has heard enough about how good the top three teams in the Eastern Conference standings are.
“Everybody is talking about Tampa, Florida, Carolina,” Letang said after practice Wednesday, “and you want to show them that you are still there.”
As the schedule plays out, the Penguins have the perfect opportunity to do just that over the next week. Their next three games are against the only three teams in the conference with more points than them (74): at the Lightning (76) on Thursday and the Hurricanes (79) on Friday along with a home game against the Panthers (75) on Tuesday.
“You want to treat every game the same, but there’s a little bit — probably — extra motivation playing against those top teams,” Letang said from UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex in Cranberry.
“You want to … try to give it a big push as kind of a measuring stick to see where you are at as a team.”
Kris Letang on the Penguins’ tough upcoming schedule pic.twitter.com/kmGp8hGFbI
— Chris Adamski (@C_AdamskiTrib) March 2, 2022
The Penguins just completed a stretch of games dating to Jan. 20 in which 11 of 17 opponents are not holding current playoff positions. That flips in a big way starting Thursday: seven opponents in a row are sitting in playoff spots.
The Penguins this season have fattened up on bad teams, going 24-6-4 against opponents who currently do not hold playoff spots. They have won fewer than half of their games this season (9-8-4) against teams currently sitting in playoff position.
“That’s something we want to improve on,” winger Zach Aston-Reese said. “Having this test in front of us, our schedule gets a lot tougher heading down the stretch into the playoffs, and that’s what you want. It’s a good measuring stick and a good test for us.”
Coach Mike Sullivan agrees that the two-plus weeks — and, specifically, the next three games — will be a good test. Where he veers from what Aston-Reese said is he won’t use them as a measuring stick.
“The whole measuring stick thing, that’s something that (the media) likes to talk about,” Sullivan said. “If I am going to use the phrase ‘measuring stick,’ we are going to hold that against ourselves and what our expectations are.”
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Seventeen of the Penguins’ next 23 games are against teams that holding playoff spots. That includes two games each against the league’s top two teams by points (the Colorado Avalanche and Hurricanes) and 10 games against the six teams with the most points in the NHL (besides the Penguins, who sit sixth).
“These are dress rehearsals, I think, for the playoffs,” forward Brian Boyle said.
There haven’t been many of those games in recent months for the Penguins, as they haven’t faced the Lightning nor the Panthers since early November, and they didn’t play Carolina or the New York Rangers at all until Feb. 20. They haven’t faced the NHL-leading Avalanche yet, and they’ve played the Western Conference’s No. 2 team, the St. Louis Blues, just once.
The Penguins’ schedule over the next five weeks comprises regular appearances by all of the aforementioned NHL heavyweights.
“We are usually in that conversation (as an NHL power), as well,” Sullivan said. “With some of the players that we have in our lineup and the legacy that they have built here, we tend to get people’s ‘A’ game, but that’s what keeps us at our best.
“When you play some of the better teams in the league, I think it’s exciting. Our players are competitive guys. They understand that.”
Chris Adamski is a TribLive reporter who has covered primarily the Pittsburgh Steelers since 2014 following two seasons on the Penn State football beat. A Western Pennsylvania native, he joined the Trib in 2012 after spending a decade covering Pittsburgh sports for other outlets. He can be reached at cadamski@triblive.com.
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