We just watched the worst three-game stretch of the Sidney Crosby era
They did not play well.
The one thing I am still struggling to wrap my head around this season is how the Pittsburgh Penguins went into the offseason with more than $20 million in salary cap space and still managed to build what might be one of the worst teams of the Sidney Crosby era around him.
Crosby is still great!
They had some salary cap flexibility!
But everything has simply gone wrong, from offseason additions not fitting the way anybody hoped, to Evgeni Malkin aging five years in one offseason, to Rickard Rakell forgetting how to score goals .... or do anything.
The only team of the Crosby era that has a strong case for being worse than this, of course, is the 2005-06 team from his rookie season. But whether that team or this team is the worst, there is one thing you can not really debate — the past three games from the Penguins was quite possibly the worst three-game stretch we have seen from a Penguins team in the Crosby era.
They scored one goal.
They lost by margins of 6-0, 5-1, and 4-0. The only goal that was scored was an innocent looking slap shot from Kris Letang that, in most cases, probably should have been stopped.
Beyond that, they rarely — if ever — seemed to be a threat to score. They lacked energy. They looked like a team going through motions after becoming resigned to their reality for this season. It was tough to watch.
It is even tougher to look at statistically.
This was only the third time since the start of the 2005-06 season that Penguins went three games in a row and scored only one goal.
The other two instances happened during the Mike Johnston era, when they scored just one goal between March 14 and March 17 in losses to the Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings and New Jersey Devils.
The other stretch came early in the 2009-10 season when they lost three consecutive games to San Jose, Boston and New Jersey between Nov. 7 and Nov. 12.
The thing about those two stretches, and this stretch, is that those final scores were at least a little bit closer.
In the first stretch they lost two games by a 2-0 margin and were only outscored an eight-goal margin.
In they second, their goal differential was minus-11.
But in this three-game stretch? They were outscored by a whopping 14 goals, losing 15-1 on aggregate. It has been part of a bigger stretch of games dating back to the start of their west coast road trip in Seattle when they were shut out by the Kraken.
Since then they have gone 1-6-0, been outscored by a 30-10 margin, blew a two-goal third period lead in Calgary and were completely dominated by the Oilers (twice), Bruins and Capitals. It has pretty much ended whatever slim playoff hopes they might have had after that impressive win in Vancouver.
Not having Jake Guentzel during that stretch — and then watching him get traded — has certainly hurt, as well as the absence of Bryan Rust (until his return this weekend). It only further magnifies the lack of organizational depth, and shows just how far the Penguins need to go to get back to a level of serious contention.
I am not sure it is going to get much better in the short-term this season.
The goaltending has regressed, Marcus Petterson has played some of his worst hockey of the season, Malkin has not recorded a shot on goal in three games and has just five over his past six games, and Guentzel isn’t walking through that door again.
The schedule also isn’t going to get much better in the coming weeks.
They get what could be a small break on Tuesday and Thursday with games against Ottawa and San Jose, which does at least give them a chance to get a couple of points. But then they have another back-to-back this weekend against playoff teams New York Rangers and Detroit, before getting a four-game stretch against New Jersey, Colorado, Dallas and Carolina. Eleven of their remaining 19 games are against teams currently in a playoff spot, while they also have two more sets of back-to-back games remaining.
The might be be favored to win only one, and maybe two, of those games.
The playoffs are not looking like an option. It is looking far more likely that they might find themselves somewhere in the top-10 of the NHL Draft Lottery odds. Stretches like this are going to help them get there.