A few months back, Las Vegas sports bookmaker Bovada set the Penguins' over/under for total points this season at 105. If you took the under, I suppose congratulations are in order.
With Friday night's 4-0 win over the Senators, the Penguins closed out their regular season with a record of 47-29-6, good enough for 100 points.
Is that a disappointment for a two-time defending Cup champion? Shouldn’t be.
A disappointment would be the Oilers, everyone's favorite pre-season Cup champion, who finished 30 points below their projected total. Or the Blackhawks, who finished 24 1/2 below theirs.
Granted, points totals have been skewed by a current system that rewards overtime losses, but consider this: It's only the 12th time in the team's 51-year history that they've reached the century mark. It's the ninth time they've reached the mark during their run of 12 straight postseason appearances.
Given what the Penguins have endured this season, from a Cup hangover, to a challenging schedule with 19 sets of back-to-backs, to the extended absences of Matt Murray, 100 points sounds just about right. For the third straight season, it was good enough for the Penguins to lock up second place in the Metropolitan Division and good enough to give them home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.
One hundred points is also one more than they earned in 2009 when they won the Stanley Cup, and it's just four points less than what they had in 2015-16 when they also won the big silver trophy.
The lesson in all this? It doesn't really matter what happens in the regular season. Even more so for the Penguins, a team that has been through and accomplished everything there is to do each of the past two springs.
"This has been a challenging year for us in a lot of different ways," Mike Sullivan was saying Friday night. "But what I love about our group is that when the stakes get high, we play at our best."
Guess what, the stakes are about to be raised and there's no reason to think Sullivan's team won't elevate its game again. This season was always going to be defined by what happens mid-April to mid-June, not what happened October through March.
• So, do I think the Penguins will win the Cup a third straight year? No clue.
Wouldn't have predicted it two years ago when it appeared the window had closed on them after five straight years of playoff underachievement. Wouldn't have predicted it last year without Kris Letang and because no team had repeated in the salary cap era.
And I'm not going to predict a three-peat now. Though I will say that they've put themselves in as good a position as any team to do it. Nobody should want to face the Penguins (see below).
• Don't know how the NHL will look at it, but I have zero problem with the Blue Jackets and Devils duck, er, resting their players in their respective season finales.
But I do find it absolutely comical that an old-school, "playing guilty" kind of guy like John Tortorella would concede any game to avoid a matchup against the Penguins. I'm just wondering if Sergei Bobrovsky put Torts up to it.
• Casey DeSmith has earned the right to be Murray's understudy in the playoffs, but if it comes down to a backup for more than a game or two, the Penguins would be in trouble. Among Eastern Conference backups, DeSmith is more in line with the Philadelphia's Petr Mrazek, Tampa Bay's Louis Domingue and Columbus' Joonas Korpisalo than, say, New Jersey's Cory Schneider, Boston's Anton Khudobin, Toronto's Curtis McElhinney or Washington's Philipp Grubauer.
• Friday night's win over Ottawa was the 200th in Sullivan's coaching career, with 130 of them coming with Pittsburgh. For me, he is the Penguins' X-factor. Don't know if he's the best coach -- he's in the conversation, obviously -- but he's clearly the best at having a feel for what his team needs and getting the most out of it.
• Nobody asked me, but if I did have a vote for the NHL's season-ending awards (full disclosure: I started on the Penguins beat too late to earn PHWA membership), I'd have Evgeni Malkin as the Hart Trophy winner, Victor Hedman for the Norris, Sean Couturier for the Selke and Mathew Barzal for the Calder. In other awards, I'd have Pekka Rinne for the Vezina and Gerard Gallant for the Jack Adams.
You could flip a coin on the Hart between Malkin and Taylor Hall. The edge here goes to Malkin since he was top five in goals and points.
• Bob Boughner won't get the Adams but his Panthers, who were officially eliminated from the postseason on Saturday, were a terrific story this season. Do not be surprised if the Cats break through next season.
• Was headed into Nationwide Arena the other day when I crossed paths with Riley Sheahan and Bryan Rust, who were walking in together from the team hotel. Hmm, wonder what the Notre Dame alums were watching Saturday night? The bond that former college players have with their alma maters is amazing.
• The hockey world is a wonderful tight-knit community and we were reminded of that once again Saturday morning after news broke of the tragic accident involving the Humboldt Broncos team bus. One of the 15 killed was Jaxon Joseph, the son of former Penguins defenseman Chris Joseph. In a little over 24 hours, a GoFundMe.com page had already raised more than $1.2 million. Inspiring stuff.