With at least a week between their regular-season finale and the first game of their postseason, the Pittsburgh Penguins will use the luxury of downtime as a tool.

They will allow the likes of injured players such as goaltender Tristan Jarry and forward Brandon Tanev to nurse any lingering ailments that have hobbled them.

And they will also practice, trying to refine every aspect of their game from puck retrievals to touch passes in the neutral zone.

“We’re looking to use this week as an opportunity,” defenseman Brian Dumoulin said via video conference. “We’ve just got to utilize this week and try to get better.”

One could make the case that’s what they did over the course of the past 16 weeks.

The team that opened the NHL season by cluster-bumbling its way to a 6-3 road loss to the Philadelphia Flyers on Jan. 13 looked much, much different from (i.e. better than) the one that secured the East Division after a tidy 1-0 home win against the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday.

And while injuries and other concerns such as protocols related to covid-19 certainly created something of a revolving door in terms of the game-to-game lineup, the Penguins largely have utilized the same roster of players over the course of the regular season with the exceptions of midseason additions in forward Jeff Carter and defenseman Mark Friedman.

So what has allowed the Penguins to show such a steady improvement in just less than four months?

“Our resilience overall,” defenseman Marcus Pettersson said. “It’s been a different year with (covid-19) protocols. Fortunately, knock on wood, we haven’t had any bigger implications with (covid-19). But we’ve had a lot of injuries, and guys have stepped up. So I think our resilience and our mindset of the next guy up has been terrific all year.”

Resilience seems like such a cliched term, but the Penguins had to use 35 players’ worth of resilience in only 56 games this season. In contrast, the 2019-20 edition of the club dressed 36 players with the benefit of playing 69 games before the regular season was halted because of the pandemic.

Cliched or not, resilience was a trait of the Penguins in the regular season.

So was scoring as one might imagine given some of the talent this roster boasts. Before Monday’s game, the Penguins were second in the NHL with 3.45 goals per game, behind the Vegas Golden Knights at 3.47.

“Offensively, we’ve been great,” forward Jared McCann said. “We’re finding each other in the (offensive) zone and making (the opposing defense) tired and doing all the right things. It’s been good offensively.

“But defensively here, I think we can tighten it up a bit and not look to cheat offensively.”

At 2.77 goals allowed per game, the Penguins were in the NHL’s middle class in terms of preventing offense. Before Monday, that figure was the NHL’s 12th best (out of 31 teams).

“When we defend, and we kind of create our offense from our defense, that’s how we’ve got to play,” Pettersson said. “We’ve seen when we don’t do it, we get punished. When we do, we get rewarded. That’s something to keep building, keep doing.”

The Penguins likely will have a week to build on their strengths and shore up their weaknesses before they open the postseason.

That’s largely the approach they took throughout the regular season.

“We’ve done the heavy lifting to this point earn the privilege to compete for the Stanley Cup, and now the fun starts,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “For me, the most rewarding part is the journey. I look forward to this next part of it in the playoffs with this group of players.”

Follow the Penguins all season long.

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