Joseph Blandisi hasn’t been a member of the Pittsburgh Penguins that long. He sporadically has been a part of the roster for less than a year.

That’s too brief a tenure to have witnessed how this organization has been impacted directly by maladies such as strokes, cancer or blood clots.

But he knows when things are bad.

Monday night was one of those occasions.

When forward Jake Guentzel, hours removed from being named to the NHL’s All-Star Game event for the first time, left Monday’s 5-2 home win against the Ottawa Senators after violently crashing into the end boards, the effect on his teammates was palpable.

The Penguins will be missing Guentzel’s skills for a significant portion of 2020 after the 25-year-old underwent surgery on his right shoulder. According to a team statement, he will be sidelined approximately four to six months.

“That was probably the most devastated I’ve seen the dressing room since I’ve been here,” Blandisi, a reserve forward, said. “You could tell that we were missing a big piece, and that’s going to hurt us for sure.”

Said rookie forward Sam Lafferty: “Walking out of the rink, you see his family and they’re devastated. Everyone is down. He’s one of our best players and such a good guy to have in the room. He’s a guy you can’t replace. It’s pretty brutal.”

The team announced the prognosis Tuesday morning. His teammates knew of it Monday night.

“We found out last night that he was out for a while,” forward Jared McCann said. “It’s tough. You can’t replace a guy like that. He’s been awesome for us all season. Obviously, he deserves to be an All-Star. When he went down, you knew something was wrong right away. He’s not the kind of kid to stay down. When we saw that, we knew it was kind of bad.”

The team’s leading scorer with 20 goals and 43 points in 39 games, Guentzel was selected as an All-Star for his sterling play. But it also was because he had been one of the relatively few members of the team who had escaped any sort of medical calamity.

Having already lost 139 man games because of injury, the team has adopted something of a gallows humor to cope.

“At this point, with everything that’s been going on, you just kind of got to laugh at it,” McCann said. “It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you just got to put your head down and laugh at it and move on. You can’t control injuries. We’ve just got to stick with it. We’ve had a lot of guys step up for us this year. Just keep at it.”

What’s the most obvious void created by Guentzel’s absence?

“Goal scoring,” defenseman Kris Letang said succinctly. “He’s proven in this league that he’s a pure goal scorer. They’re hard to find. You have guys that have good years here or there, but a guy that’s going to put up goals like he does consistently, it’s hard to find. He’s a smart player out there. He plays well out there defensively. He’s a huge part of our team. It’s going to be hard to fill his spot.”

How that spot gets filled remains to be seen. The Penguins focused on individual skills in practice Tuesday at Cranberry and did not have any sort of line rushes.

What was evident was a resolute attitude that has been in place for the past three months despite long-term injuries to Sidney Crosby, Patric Hornqvist, Brian Dumoulin, Evgeni Malkin and others. After practice, several teammates, potentially buoyed by a three-game winning streak, were in a jovial mood. At one point, forward Bryan Rust used a skate guard to “interview” forward Dominik Simon during a media scrum.

In other words, it was business as usual.

“We can’t just lay down and feel sorry for ourselves,” defenseman Marcus Pettersson said. “That’s been our strength going through all these injuries. We know we still want to be competitive and play. We’ve been winning that way. Even though we have injuries, we can’t just lay down and die and just feel sorry for ourselves. Everybody’s come together as a group.”

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