BOSTON -- What if the NHL's trade deadline had been, say, Tuesday at 3 p.m., or even sometime later Monday night?
Anything -- anything -- except two hours after the Penguins wrapped up practice that day at the Lemieux Sports Complex.
Practice might make perfect but for the Penguins it produced two injuries of consequence: Matt Murray and Zach Aston-Reese.
The most concerning, obviously, is the concussion sustained by Murray after taking a slap shot to the head. There's a reason why he's considered among the elite goalies in the league and if you didn't think so before, I present to you the last three games in which he has not started.
Not coincidentally, all three games have been Penguins losses, the latest of which came in an 8-4 drubbing Thursday night against the Bruins at TD Garden.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCORE, STANDINGS, VIDEOThis was supposed to be a measuring stick game for both teams, but particularly for the Penguins, who trailed Boston by eight points entering Thursday. The visitors simply didn't measure up, didn't even compare, really.
There have been a few common threads (more on those later) during this three-game skid, their longest since mid-December, but the sub-par goaltending has been at the root. Again, that's not to say that Casey DeSmith was solely to blame for Thursday's loss or the one to the Devils before that, or that Tristan Jarry was completely at fault for last weekend's loss to Florida.
But any way you cut it, giving up three goals on five shots in 5:27, as DeSmith did, isn't even giving your team a chance. A chance is all you can ask for from a backup goalie. This one was painful to watch as DeSmith, who grew up a little over an hour north of the Garden, struggled.
On Rick Nash's first-period goal, the last one DeSmith surrendered, he got no help after Jamie Oleksiak failed to pick up a career 400-goal scorer alone in front of the net:
It was much the same last Saturday against the Panthers when Jarry was yanked after giving up four goals on 16 shots. Jarry didn't fare much better Thursday in relief either, giving up five goals on 33 shots. He could feel DeSmith's pain:
With just 16 games remaining in the regular season, DeSmith or Jarry has to emerge as the clear No. 2 goalie to Murray. But with the franchise goalie out indefinitely, neither has staked claim to the job. Sullivan says he hasn't lost faith in either and doesn't believe their confidence is shaken.
"No, these are two good character guys," Mike Sullivan said. "They're good people and I know they'll bounce back. They've been very good for us. So we're just going to have to stay with it."
Until Murray gets back, whenever that is, the Penguins have no other choice but to stay with it.
If Murray is out two or three games, the Penguins can get by with either DeSmith or Jarry. But if it's weeks or longer, well, that could spell serious trouble.
No judgment here, but that is the inherent risk the Penguins ran by going with two goalies with 26 combined career starts to their resumes.
One has to wonder if the organization might have gone after a veteran backup at Monday's trade deadline if they had another day or only had a few more hours to know the severity of Murray's injury. But that's the thing with concussions: You never know. When Jim Rutherford gave his post-deadline news conference, Murray was still being evaluated for a concussion that wouldn't be officially announced until Tuesday.
Indeed, hockey is a game of split-second decisions in more ways than one.
1. There were two intangible positives to take from this. Seriously.
In the cramped but quiet -- well, except for the fans that were airing out the stink -- visitor's room at TD Garden on Thursday night, three players spoke: Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang. All wear letters for good reason.
That doesn't happen after every game, but neither do losses like this. The eight goals were the second-most allowed this season and the four-goal margin was the fourth-largest. They hadn't been beaten this bad since a 7-1 loss at Winnipeg on Oct. 29.
But when the core group speaks, it says volumes about their leadership and character. That means something. Mind you, this is a proud team that isn't likely to be derailed for long. They've been through similar stretches and emerged stronger for it.
The other positive is the team's toughness. Since the trades last weekend of Ryan Reaves and Ian Cole, there have been plenty questioning it. I think Oleksiak had something to say about that to Zdeno Chara in an epic heavyweight bout:
Seriously, big props to Oleksiak for taking on the only player in the NHL bigger than him after the Bruins captain was taking liberties with Crosby and Patric Horqnvist. Unfortunately for the Penguins, it was one of the few things the big defenseman did right (see No. 4), and they have to show this "pushback" sooner, not when down three goals.
Look, the Penguins' "identity is what it is," as Sullivan was saying the other day, and they're not going to be confused with the Big Bad Bruins of the '70s, though the current group tried to reprise that role Thursday.
This was a physical game between two teams trying to send messages for the next time they might meet which most likely wouldn't be until the Eastern Conference Final. The Penguins may not win a war of fisticuffs, but that can't define their toughness, as Sullivan said:
"Those are two big guys," Crosby told me. "Rig did a great job there but, even still, we have to play a harder game. Not just the physicality part, but winning battles and making all those little plays."
2. Some bad habits have crept back into their game.
The Penguins seemed to have turned the clock back to December as they have fallen back into some seriously bad habits. When they lose it's usually the same culprits; chief among them is allowing too many odd-man breaks. When they don't win loose puck battles or get too aggressive in their end, the play usually ends up going the other way and, lately, in their own net.
That's 17 goals allowed in the last three games, if you're counting. That's not all on the goalies.
"This is a problem for us because we're giving up so many 3-on-1's and 3-on-2's right now," Letang said. "There's a certain point in the league, there are so many good players that are going to make plays and score goals, so we're going to have to play better defensively and tighten up our game for sure."
No team can win by giving up odd-man chances constantly, especially the Penguins, whose preferred zone to play in is not their own. It's about paying attention to details.
"We can't play like they score five or six, we think we score seven," Malkin said. "No, it doesn't work like that. We have to understand that our game starts in D-zone."
3. A rough night for Jacques Martin's PK.
The Cole trade has left the Penguins without one of, if not, their best penalty killing defensemen. Though his absence had no impact on the PK in the first three games since the trade, it cost them dearly on Thursday. Honestly, not even Cole could have saved the Penguins against the Bruins.
The Penguins surrendered three Boston power play goals on just four chances, including this one by David Krejci, his third of the game, on Jarry in the second period:
Granted two of the three power play goals the Bruins scored were in the second period when the game was already decided, but as you see above, the Penguins were just fried.
Krejci joined the Jets' Blake Wheeler, the Blackhawks' Brandon Saad, Vancouver's Brock Boeser and the Panthers' Evgenii Dadonov as the five players to record hat tricks against the Penguins this season. It's the most HT's they've surrendered in a season since 2005-06, Crosby's rookie year when they didn't make the playoffs. More concerning is that Dadonov and Krejci did it just three games apart.
The three power play goals allowed tied a season-high -- or low depending on your perspective -- last done Oct. 21 vs. Tampa Bay in a 7-1 loss. What else do the Bruins and Lightning have in common? Those are two teams who the Penguins would figure to meet in the third round of the playoffs.
Martin's PK unit has slipped to 14th overall in the league in recent weeks after being ranked as high as seventh. Giving up three power play goals in a game, the Penguins probably aren't going to last very long in a playoff series.
4. That third defense pair needs retooled.
No point going chapter and verse on every goal allowed in a blowout loss. But the stats do reveal some interesting tidbits about the defense.
Like how there were 12 combined goals scored and Letang wasn't on the ice for a single one of them. That's mind-boggling. Or how Olli Maatta had the second two-goal game of his career and Justin Schultz was somehow a plus-2, the only Pittsburgh player to be in the black.
But it also shows what's starting to become painfully obvious, if it hadn't already: the pairing of Oleksiak and Matt Hunwick isn't working. And, no, it's not all on Hunwick.
Oleksiak was a team-worst minus-3, while Huwnick was a minus-2 and was on the ice for two of Boston's three power plays. Hunwick's Corsi For percentage at 5-on-5 was a miniscule 15.38, the lowest on the team.
Yep, after two months, it's time to bring Chad Ruhwedel out of the press box, allowing Oleksiak to move to his strong side to see if there's some chemistry there with the right-handed Ruhwedel. It's hard to envision Sullivan breaking up his other two pairs, so the writing should be on the wall for the third pair.
5. Derick Brassard will be fine.
The newly-acquired center was rather quiet in his second game in a Penguins uniform. However, he did pick up the secondary assist on Maatta's second goal of the game at the 5:15 mark of the third period, by which point I'm sure most people had tuned this game out.
Due to the second period being played mostly on special teams, Brassard played just 15:15, 1:00 of it on the power play and :34 shorthanded on Thursday.
When at even strength, Brassard skated with Conor Sheary and Phil Kessel. But that line -- Brassard (25.0), Sheary (23.3) and Kessel (17.35) -- had three of the four lowest possession numbers on the Penguins. The only lower, of course was, Hunwick.
These things take time.