The Penguins summoned Joseph Blandisi from their farm team in Wilkes-Barre Thursday, and it was a perfectly logical move.
With Evgeni Malkin ailing and unavailable, they wanted a capable forward who could be plugged into their lineup on short notice.
But 32 games into this season, it's clear that the Penguins need a more dramatic personnel move than simply bringing in a marginal NHLer from the minors, or trading for a spare part from some other club.
Forget a goal-scoring winger, or a physical defenseman.
It's time for Jim Rutherford to acquire the rights to a faith healer.
Or an exorcist.
Or both.
Because the team he has constructed certainly appears to be cursed.
As cursed as a club that's 18-10-4 after its 1-0 overtime victory against the Blue Jackets Thursday night at PPG Paints Arena can be, anyway.
"I don't know if (Fate) hates us," Bryan Rust said. "But it's definitely testing us. And we've done a pretty good job of rising to the occasion. It's just one of those things where you just have to shake your head, laugh it off and keep going with who you've got."
That's a fair point and on one level, perhaps it isn't a shock that the Penguins took two points out of this game, since Columbus is now 0-5-4 in its past nine visits.
But on another -- the one where logic resides -- it makes no sense whatsoever, because the Penguins dressed a 20-man squad that looked as if someone had randomly cut-and-pasted chunks of their depth chart into personnel groupings.
There's nothing terribly new about that, of course. For most of this season, Mike Sullivan's lineup has been like a Jenga tower, with one significant piece after another being removed.
Fate apparently tired of waiting for the whole thing to collapse, though, so doused it with gasoline then hit it with a blowtorch by rendering Malkin too ill to play against the Blue Jackets.
His absence meant the Penguins had $31.7 million of salary-cap space in street clothes because of injury and illness, with all but Brian Dumoulin's $4.1 million represented by four forwards: Malkin ($9.5 million), Sidney Crosby ($8.7 million), Patric Hornqvist ($5.3 million) and Nick Bjugstad ($4.1 million).
The Penguins' total of man-games lost because of injuries and illness this season swelled to 124, of which only 122 or so have been to key contributors.
"Injuries hit a lot of teams," Sullivan said. "We're no different. They've hit us pretty hard here early in the season, but in a lot of ways, it helps us to find out about ourselves."
Sullivan and his staff have to like most of what they've learned about their team, but they also have to be quietly wondering if it's only a matter of hours before the Penguins are faced with a plague of frogs or locusts, or some other Biblical-style menace.
If that happens -- and, considering what's gone on for the past two-plus months, let's not rule anything out -- the Penguins can only hope to respond the way they have to all the medical adversities they've confronted so far this season.
"The positive thing is the way we're handling it," Jack Johnson said. "Hopefully, sometime early in January maybe, we'll have a healthy lineup. If we can keep rolling and then get a healthy lineup going, we can make some serious headway."
Until then, they'll rely on clutch performances like the one Rust turned in while scoring the only goal of the game during a power play at 3:02 of overtime. He deftly lifted the stick of Columbus defenseman Seth Jones so that a puck Kris Letang had chipped toward the net could make it through to him, then backhanded it past Blue Jackets goalie Joonas Korpisalo:
"I went to get a stick on it, kind of a bouncer in there," Jones told reporters on the Columbus side. "I just lost body position on it."
That's the only one of 32 Penguins shots that eluded Korpisalo. Unfortunately for the Blue Jackets, it was one more than they were able to get behind Tristan Jarry in 17 tries.
Jarry earned his third shutout in his past four starts, on a night when anything less than perfection on his part would have cost the Penguins at least one point in the standings.
"That's my focus every night," he said. "To stop every puck that I can."
He and Rust, coincidentally enough, were two of the guys whose roles and job descriptions didn't change much for the Columbus game.
Rust was, as usual of late, the first-line right winger.
However, his linemates on the No. 1 unit were a left winger who has just two goals in 23 games, Alex Galchenyuk, and a guy who already has scored 17, Jake Guentzel.
The catch is that Guentzel got those goals as a winger, but played center against the Blue Jackets.
"We didn't have a lot of options," Sullivan said. "We discussed some of the options we had, but there weren't a whole lot."
That probably means Sullivan couldn't convince Mario Lemieux to come out of retirement and get in the best shape of his life again by game time.
Well, Lemieux isn't going back on active duty and, with the exception of Malkin, none of the guys who sat out the Columbus game are likely to anytime soon, either.
Still, with more than a third of the season gone, the Penguins have survived personnel challenges they couldn't have foreseen coming during training camp.
"I can't say enough about this group," Sullivan said. "They're great character guys. They don't look for excuses."
No, but they couldn't be blamed for looking for reinforcements, and the time for seeking talent in places like Wilkes-Barre or Anaheim or Winnipeg to counter the Penguins' medical issues probably has passed.
At this point, Rutherford should be looking to forge a deal to bring someone in from Lourdes, the religious shrine in France where miraculous cures have been reported for centuries.
Or least to acquire enough of the healing liquid from there to fill his players' water bottles.
• For a guy who earns his living on the wing, Guentzel did a credible job at center, including winning seven of 13 faceoffs. "Jake is such a smart player," Sullivan said. "He has the ability to adjust and adapt. ... He was over 50 percent (on draws). For a guy who doesn't take a lot of faceoffs, that's pretty impressive."
• The Blue Jackets accumulated a 43-37 advantage in hits, led by a game-high nine by right winger Josh Anderson. Brandon Tanev had eight for the Penguins.
• Jarry joins Marc-Andre Fleury as the only goalies in franchise history to record three shutouts in a four-start span. Fleury did it Oct. 25-Nov. 1, 2014.
• Letang's assist on Rust's goal was his 200th career power-play point. Paul Coffey, who had 225, is the only other Penguins defenseman to record that many.
• Columbus forward Sonny Milano could have been awarded a penalty shot when Marcus Pettersson swept his feet out from under him while Milano has driving to the Penguins' net after blocking a Chad Ruhwedel shot late in the second period, but referee Wes McCauley opted to assess only a tripping minor. Obviously, the Blue Jackets failed to score on the power play.
THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
THE INJURIES
• Nick Bjugstad (core muscle surgery)
• Sidney Crosby (sports hernia surgery)
• Brian Dumoulin (ankle surgery)
• Patric Hornqvist (unspecified lower-body)
THE LINEUPS
Sullivan’s lines and pairings:
Alex Galchenyuk -- Jake Guentzel -- Bryan Rust
Zach Aston-Reese -- Jared McCann -- Dominik Kahun
Dominik Simon -- Teddy Blueger -- Brandon Tanev
Joseph Blandisi -- Sam Lafferty -- Stefan Noesen
Kris Letang -- John Marino
Jack Johnson -- Justin Schultz
Marcus Pettersson -- Chad Ruhwedel
And for John Tortorella's Blue Jackets:
Gustav Nyquist -- Alexandre Texier -- Cam Atkinson
Sonny Milano -- Pierre-Luc Dubois -- Oliver Bjorkstrand
Nick Foligno -- Boone Jenner -- Josh Anderson
Alexander Wennberg -- Riley Nash -- Eric Robinson
Dean Kukan -- Seth Jones
Ryan Murray -- David Savard
Vladislav Gavrikov -- Andrew Peeke
THE SCHEDULE
The Penguins are scheduled to practice Friday at noon in Cranberry before closing out their three-game home stand Saturday against Los Angeles at 7:08 p.m.
THE COVERAGE
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MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins vs. Blue Jackets, PPG Paints Arena, Dec. 12, 2019 -- MATT SUNDAY / DKPS