Can any Penguins depth players step up offensively to help complement top line?

Michael Bunting might be the best bet given the number of chances he has had.

The good news for the Pittsburgh Penguins right now in terms of their line combinations is that by loading up their three best offensive players at the moment (Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Rickard Rakell) they have at least given themselves one trio that can potentially take over a game.

That unit has spent the past three games together and outscored teams by a 4-0 margin (and 5-0 for the season), and pretty much carried them to wins over Anaheim and Montreal this past week.

The bad news is that by loading up their three best offensive players on one unit they have pretty much cannibalized whatever scoring depth they might have had on the roster.

Over that same stretch of games the other three lines have been outscored by a 4-0 margin when none of the big-three are on the ice.

That is a problem.

As good as the top line has been, there is only so much you can do when you are a one-line team, and while that might work against the worst teams in the league it is probably not going to produce a winning result against teams like Carolina or Washington this week.

Somebody else has to step up.

One player in particular that needs to step up — and is perhaps the most likely to step up — is forward Michael Bunting.

Bunting has been one of the biggest early disappointments on the roster, entering Tuesday’s game against the New York Islanders with zero goals and only one assists in 12 games. He has as many healthy scratches as he does points. He talked about his slow start this week, saying he has never been through a start like this in his career.

My expectations were a little high for Bunting this season because he played so well last year after the trade with Carolina. Not only in terms of production, but in terms of his overall approach and playing style. It was the exact type of forward the Penguins had been lacking. Even if it was unrealistic to expect him to keep scoring the way he did over the final month-and-a-half of the 2023-24 season, he still has a track record of being better than this and at least scoring at more than a 20-goal pace.

He is also not wrong about this being the worst start of his career. In every other NHL season he has had at least two goals and six points through his first 12 games, and if he had simply maintained his career average shooting percentage (around 12.9 percent) on his 28 shots on goal he should have around three or four goals by this point.

HIs underlying numbers are also painting a similar story.

He referenced the number of chances that he has been getting, and the numbers back up what he is feeling.

Over the past three games nobody on the team has more individual expected goals (all situations) than Bunting’s 1.64, while his five high-danger scoring chances are tied for second most on the team.

For the season his 3.60 individual expected goals are fifth-most on the team, while his 1.24 expected goals per 60 minutes is the second-highest rate on the team. The chances are definitely there, and I do feel like there might be a dam about to break for him. It would certainly help if that happened sooner rather than later.

I know sometimes it can be a crutch to lean on numbers like this when a player is not scoring, and I am not anticipating Bunting to score 30 goals the rest of the way, but I do think it is unreasonable to assume he is going to keep getting shut out like this, and there are at least some signs that he is generating some chances. Eventually some of those are going to go in the net.

Bunting looks to be skating on a third line on Tuesday with Noel Accairi and Jesse Puljujarvi.

Lars Eller, Kevin Hayes and Drew O’Connor have also seen their offense dry up after promising starts earlier in the year. With Eller and O’Connor now taking on a second-line role it is a big necessity for them to generate at least a little more offense than they have over the past two weeks. The O’Connor and Eller duo has done an acceptable job defending, and they are definitely playing like Penguins in the sense that they have racked up expected goal differentials without the actual goals, but they need to start producing a little bit of offense to not only take some of the pressure of the top line, but to also help pick up the slack in case the top-line does not score every single night.

[Data In This Post Via Natural Stat Trick And Hockey-Reference]