This much is known: The NHL suspended play in the 2019-20 season Thursday. There won't be any games for the foreseeable future. No practices or team meetings, either.
And that's about it.
Much more is not known, and here is a modest sample of those things: How long will this pause in the schedule last? Can the Stanley Cup playoffs -- let alone any remaining part of the regular season -- be salvaged? How will such an unscheduled break, regardless of its length, affect individual teams?
Many of those issues are interconnected, and guessing at the answers to most at this point would be about as fact-based as predicting a coin toss.
That certainly is true of the Penguins, who sit third in the Metropolitan Division and fifth in the Eastern Conference with a 40-23-6 record. They're not going to overtake Boston for first place in the East, but still have a chance to climb past Washington and Philadelphia and into the top spot in the division.
When -- if -- play resumes, will they resemble the team that overcame so much adversity for most of this season and was perched atop the Metropolitan just a few weeks ago? Or will they be more like the one that's 3-8 in its past 11 games, with those victories coming against three opponents that who won't see a playoff game this spring without purchasing a ticket?
The Penguins' final game before the league went into suspended animation, a 5-2 victory at New Jersey Tuesday, was their best all-around showing in quite a while, but 60 minutes isn't necessarily a convincing sample size. Had they replicated that performance in Columbus Thursday night, when they were scheduled to meet the Blue Jackets at Nationwide Arena, it would have been evidence that they are pulling out of the tailspin that dropped them below the Capitals and Flyers, but that game was called off about six hours before it was supposed to begin.
It seems reasonable to believe that the league-wide shutdown ultimately will be measured in weeks, if not months, and it's easy to see how it could have one of two radically different impacts on the Penguins: If could be that the time off robs them of any chemistry that might have been returning, and they will stagger through whatever semblance of a stretch drive is played once the NHL is back in session.
Conversely, the time off could give the group -- and some individuals -- a chance for a reset.
Sidney Crosby, who hasn't had his customary impact of late, could return to his usual rarefied form. Perhaps Kris Letang will take the time away from the rink to exorcise some of the poor-decision demons that have turned up in his game. And maybe members of the power play, which has converted a meager 19.9 percent of its chances in 2019-20, will figure out a way to make the whole of the unit equal the sum of its parts.
But the biggest benefit to the Penguins, should things break just right for them, might be how the pause affects the return of Jake Guentzel, who is recovering from shoulder surgery.
When he was operated on Dec. 31, the prognosis was that he would miss a minimum of four months, which would have put Guentzel's best-case scenario for rejoining the lineup at sometime during Round 2 of the playoffs. The obvious problem for the Penguins there is that their prospects of making it that far would be a whole lot better if Guentzel was in uniform for Round 1.
Team officials consistently have deflected questions about the status of Guentzel's recovery, saying that it is "too early" to accurately assess how it's going, but he's been seen several times in the past week or so without the sling he had been using to support his right arm. That certainly doesn't mean his return is imminent, but has to be construed as a sign of healing.
Guentzel's progress is significant because, depending on when regular-season play resumes -- assuming it does -- it's conceivable that the start of the playoffs would be pushed back, which means that he could be back earlier in the postseason, or perhaps before it even begins.
There's no assurance that will happen, of course. It's entirely possible that Guentzel won't get medical clearance to play until next season, just as it could be that coronavirus will linger long enough that the NHL decides against awarding the Stanley Cup for just the third time in more than a century. (The others were 1919, because of Spanish flu, and 2005, because of a lockout.)
And regardless of when Guentzel reclaims his place in the lineup, there's no guarantee he'll pile up goals at the same pace he did before being injured. Then again, it can't be ruled out that he'd be even more prolific than he was before being injured.
At this point, there's just no way of knowing.
Which is the case with just about everything associated with the NHL these days.