Penguins' Kris Letang played through 'myriad of injuries for a long time' this season

Pittsburgh Penguins alternate captain Kris Letang was blunt when asked how he was feeling physically a few days before the end of the regular season.

“I feel like you should feel after 81 games,” he said, responding to a media inquiry about several end-of-year maintenance days that kept him out of practices and morning skates.

Letang wound up playing in all 82 regular-season games for the first time in his 18-year career, averaging 24 minutes, 41 seconds of ice time per night while scoring 10 goals with 41 assists.

It marked the first time Letang and fellow franchise pillars Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin played all 82 games together.

During the Penguins’ locker cleanout Thursday, Letang hinted at dealing with unspecified health-related issues late in the year.

“I was going through some stuff, so it was more logical to take those (maintenance) days,” said Letang, who turns 37 on April 24.

Coach Mike Sullivan, offering what he could without going into specifics, shed a bit more light on Letang’s status.

“What I will tell you is that (Letang) was dealing with a myriad of injuries for a long time,” Sullivan said. “He’s a warrior — there’s no other way to put it — with some of the things he was dealing with down the stretch and continuing to play through to try to help us get to where we wanted to go. That was a big reason why he wasn’t practicing, that I will offer you.”

Letang said — again, on an unspecified basis — that offseason surgery is going to be something he’ll discuss with club medical officials.

Sullivan, asked to elaborate, deferred to president of hockey operations/general manager Kyle Dubas, who is set to field questions from reporters Friday morning.

End-of-year reflections

One by one, as Penguins players filtered into their Cranberry facility locker room to conduct final interviews with the media, their reflections on the season were similar.

They were proud of how the team rallied in the closing weeks to have a shot at the postseason but admitted the vast majority of their season was woefully inconsistent.

“Obviously we played better down the stretch,” winger Reilly Smith said. “But it’s an 82-game season for a reason. So you gotta look at the whole body of work. And, I think as a group, we didn’t live up to our expectations.”

During their late-season 10-game surge when they went 7-0-3, the Penguins won four straight games from April 1-6.

That stretch was certainly impressive, but too little, too late.

The club managed just one other streak of four-plus wins in a row, from Nov. 4-14, when it strung together five straight victories.

In between, the Penguins managed just two other mini-winning streaks, both of which were three games.

“I think we had a good group of guys in here. I think we had a much better team than where we ended up, and that’s on all of us,” defenseman Erik Karlsson said. “It’s hard to pinpoint just one thing on why it didn’t go the way that we wanted to. It wasn’t for lack of effort, I know that much. It’s a very professional group in here, and we all tried as hard as we could to find new ways and figure things out, and unfortunately, we did not. And that’s just sad.”

Like Karlsson, forward Lars Eller just completed his first season in Pittsburgh.

He offered perhaps the most incisive assessment of why the Penguins fell short of preseason expectations.

In summary, they have no one to blame but themselves.

“I think we had a very capable group in here and, for some reason, we didn’t pick ourselves up and play with that urgency and attention to detail for long enough stretches of the year,” he said. “There’s going to be stretches where you go through some struggles and adversity, but I saw a lot of self-inflicted harm.”

Trio rejoins Wilkes-Barre/Scranton

Three Pittsburgh Penguins will partake in the playoffs after all, albeit in the American Hockey League.

The club reassigned three players to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the AHL to compete in the upcoming Calder Cup playoffs: forwards Radim Zohorna and Valtteri Puustinen and defenseman Jack St. Ivany.

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins qualified for the playoffs early in April.

With two more regular-season games remaining, they occupy third place in the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference.

Were the season to end today, the No. 3-seeded Penguins (38-23-8) would face No. 6 Lehigh Valley in a three-game first-round series.

From there, division semifinal and division final rounds move to a best-of-five series, with the conference finals and Calder Cup Finals being best-of-seven.

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins have never captured the Calder Cup.

Notes: Defenseman Ryan Shea was placed on waivers Thursday afternoon. If he goes unclaimed by 2 p.m. Friday, he can be reassigned to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. Shea averaged 12:37 of nightly ice time over 31 games with the Penguins this year. He made his NHL debut on Oct. 21 and scored his first career goal on April 4. He is at the end of a one-year deal worth $775,000 annually.

• Forwards Noel Acciari and Jonathan Gruden plus defenseman Ryan Graves all conducted a brief skate in Cranberry before locker cleanout. Acciari (unspecified injury) and Graves (concussion) ended the season on long-term injured reserve. Acciari is signed through 2025-26 and carries a salary cap hit of $2 million. Graves is inked through 2028-29 on a six-year, $27 million deal worth $4.5 million annually signed last summer.