It speaks so much of Conor Sheary's current slump that he's now gone 15 games without a goal, eight games without a point, and neither of those numbers comes close to sizing up the scope of his struggles.
Not to be mean.
The cold fact is that Sheary probably wouldn't be playing for the Penguins at all right now if not for, one, the Senators declining him in the Derick Brassard trade and, two, Zach Aston-Reese getting hurt. He'd either be in the press box or Ottawa or wherever Ottawa would have spun him.
But his fate is that he's still here, still getting a chance and ... well, not doing a blessed thing with it beyond digging a deeper hole:
Above was a routine rush Monday night in the second period of the Penguins' 4-3 overtime victory against the Flames at PPG Paints Arena. Kris Letang spots Sheary cutting up through center ice, the stick's presented, the puck arrives right on target and ... nothing. No clean reception, no acceleration, then an awkward stumble upon approaching the Calgary line.
That'd be an unfair criticism in isolation. It isn't in bulk:
Above, Dominik Simon spots Sheary moving briskly up the left wing and snaps a sharp lead pass, again right on target. And again ... nothing. The puck ricochets off Sheary's stick as if he were a 1970s enforcer. The Flames easily recover and roll back the other way.
When he has had the puck, it's been no better:
Above, he beats the Flames' Sam Bennett to a puck along the wall in the Pittsburgh zone, he sees Garnet Hathaway converging on him ... and he just panics. Bizarrely, he flips the puck into the middle of the rink, right toward yet another opponent, Mark Jankowski. If not for the alertness of Riley Sheahan backchecking Jankowski, it would have been an egregious giveaway.
It's not pretty. It isn't pleasant. But it's been a thing for a while now, and it's only getting more and more prominent, certainly per the viral work of our Chris Benson:
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Sheary's been a very good player at times over the past three seasons, and he's been, as Jim Rutherford put it after keeping Sheary at the NHL trade deadline, "a contributor to two Stanley Cups." No one can or should diminish that.
But this young man's confidence is crushed. He's capable of better. He deserves better. And to that end, he's in desperate need of some time off that ice.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCORE, STANDINGS, VIDEO• If anyone ever doubts Sullivan's word when he swears he doesn't own a doghouse, consider that he never really stopped playing that fourth line.
Even after a shift in the first period that might have been the worst by any line on any team in this building all winter:
That's just the result, though that alone illustrates three Penguins frozen in time in front of Jarry -- Sheahan, Tom Kuhnhackl and Olli Maatta had all been planted there for a while -- and Sheary was not exactly effective in preventing Mark Giordano's flick from the left boards.
Same line was out there for Calgary's second goal, with much the same statuesque approach.
This dog deserved some grand medieval castle, not just a house.
• What's a Kris Letang hat trick?
How about a goal, an assist and a total head-scratcher of a defensive sequence?
That and more on the mercurial No. 58, via the spoken word:
• Evgeni Malkin's got a dozen three-point games now, most in the NHL, nine of those since the calendar flipped to 2018. He's got 82 total points, second in the league by a shrinking margin of three behind the Lightning's Nikita Kucherov, and his first time over 80 since 2011-12. He's got 19 points in his past 10 games.
It never feels OK to say anyone on the team is better than Sidney Crosby. So I'll tiptoe around it: Malkin's better than anyone anywhere right now.
• Jamie Oleksiak wasn't on the ice for any of Calgary's three goals. Neither was Matt Hunwick. These two events aren't coincidence.
• I've appreciated and applauded the NHL's crackdown on slashing and hooking. But tripping constitutes a stick foul, too, and there might have been a half-dozen in this game that went uncalled by Kevin Pollock and Ghislain Hebert, and that's unacceptable. Neither team was guiltier than the other, but that doesn't excuse officials from failure to call an infraction that's so basic, so obvious.
• The Flames have had to dig deep into the reservoir for goaltending in Mike Smith's absence, and that showed with Jon Gillies' jittery showing, and they're three points out of the Western playoff picture at 32-25-10. But be plenty sure they outperformed the home team in every other regard -- 38-32 in shots, 68-54 in attempted shots -- and deserved both points.
They knew it ...
"I didn't have any problem with the effort," the Flames' coach, Glen Gulutzan, said. "We didn't get the breaks, but we played well."
... Gulutzan's counterpart seemed to know it, too.
"We found a way to win, but I'm not going to sit here and say we played a good game," Sullivan said. "We knew we were going to play a team that was coming with a lot of urgency, and that's what they did. You have to give Calgary credit. They're a good hockey team, and they're hard to play against. We had moments in the game, but as a whole, I know we can be better."
• Johnny Gaudreau flat-out missing the net on an unfettered 120-foot overtime breakaway was as stunning as it was critical. But tap the stick for Tristan Jarry, too, as he came way out, then backpedaled gradually -- as all goaltenders are coached -- but then stayed way out to force Gaudreau's hand.
• After edging the ice-cold Islanders and the getting-colder Flames, they'll have to be a lot better against the Flyers, who ... well, they were one of the NHL's hottest teams with a 10-0-2 tear through the end of February, but they've lost all three games in March, so who knows?
• No one ever mentions the Penguins' sellout streak anymore, if you've noticed.
And there's a reason for that: They weren't wild about it becoming a topic of conversation every time someone would spot a handful of seats, or every time there were tickets available through the student-rush program within an hour of faceoff, then accuse them of manufacturing some aspect of a sellout. So they stopped announcing the streak when announcing the attendance and -- voila! -- we all stopped talking about it.
Which is fine. All of it.
But I'm here to tell you, anyway, that the streak is currently at 518 after a capacity crowd of 18,630 showed up on a Monday night in early March against the Flames.
I'm also here to tell you that this is damned impressive, particularly in the context that these tickets are damned expensive at an average of $98. Even those student-rush prices are $29, or nearly $10 more than the average regular ticket at PNC Park.
It's a hockey town.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
