Todd Reirden still hasn't gone public with the details of his plans for the Penguins' power play -- it's quite possible that he's still formulating them -- but one issue with which he will have to deal is the absence of Patric Hornqvist, who provided an aggressive net-front presence for most of his six seasons here.
The Penguins don't have anyone who figures to approach those duties quite the way Hornqvist, who was traded to Florida after last season, did, but if they struggle to fill that role effectively, one guy who might merit a look is Zach Aston-Reese, currently recovering from shoulder surgery.
Mind you, it's far from certain that Aston-Reese could do that job well, considering that he has just 18 goals in 116 career games, and that none of those have been scored on the power play.
Still, Aston-Reese has the size (6 foot, 204 pounds) to deal with close-quarters combat around the crease and the 31 goals he scored in 38 games as a senior at Northeastern suggest there's scoring ability hidden in his game.
He should not be Option No. 1 for the net-front position, but if no one has done a satisfactory job there by the time Aston-Reese is healthy enough to resume playing, he might be worth a look.
Oh, and one more thing: Of those 31 goals he scored in his final season with the Huskies, 13 came on the power play.
• Perhaps long-ago Blackhawks forward Fred Sasakamoose doesn't have the greatest name in the history of pro hockey -- it's hard to believe anyone can wrest that distinction from WHA defenseman Bart Crashley -- but he just might be a medalist in that regard. He also is, unfortunately, a victim of the coronavirus pandemic that has dominated this most distressing of years. Sasakamoose, 86, was hospitalized in Saskatchewan Friday after experiencing chest pains difficulty breathing, and was diagnosed with COVID-19 Sunday. He resides on a Cree Nation reserve and was one of the first indigenous players to compete in the NHL.
• It's a virtual certainty that the 2020-21 season will be shorter than the usual 82 games and it seems like a safe bet that fans won't be allowed in most arenas, at least in the early going, but the Penguins apparently have yet to decide what to do with money they have received from season-ticket buyers. Precedent suggests that fans likely will be offered either a refund for any games that were purchased but for which no fans (or a limited number of them) were allowed to be present or have the ticket-buyers to apply those funds to the following season. This is not an entirely unprecedented situation, since teams often sell tickets for more playoff games than they actually end up playing.
• The NHL still has not announced its divisional alignment for the coming season, and while many of the groupings that have been suggested have the Penguins in with a number of other Metropolitan Division clubs, there are others that place them in more of a midwestern division, alongside the likes of Chicago and St. Louis. That would be less than ideal for them, at least from a travel perspective, but it would not be the most illogical division to which they've belonged. That, without question, would be the Norris Division, out of which they operated from 1974-1981. They were with Los Angeles, Montreal, Detroit and Washington for the first five seasons, and Hartford replaced the Capitals for the final two. It's tough to top a five-team division whose members represent two countries, along with the Eastern and Pacific time zones.
• When is a deal not a deal? When it's negotiated during a pandemic, apparently. League officials and the NHL Players' Association negotiated an extension to the collective bargaining agreement as part of a Return to Play plan earlier this year, but the NHL now is looking to adjust some of the terms for 2020-21, including an increase of the amount of escrow that can be withheld from players' pay above 20 percent and a bump in how much salary can be deferred beyond 10 percent. Both sides have made it clear that they want to make a 2020-21 season happen, but there likely are some long, hard negotiations ahead before the details of how that will be possible are ironed out.
• The proposal to have an all-Canadian division in 2020-21 because of Canada's border-crossing restrictions may have hit a bit of a snag recently, as British Columbia premier John Horgan has said that people should not enter or leave his province for anything other than essential business. Such a restriction has not been formalized, but if it is, it's easy to see how it could get difficult for the Canucks to operate out of Vancouver during the coming season. Horgan, by the way, has suggested that Canada's federal authorities should consider imposing similar restrictions across that country to help contain the spread of coronavirus.
• The Penguins believe that Tristan Jarry could solidify them in goal for the better part of a decade, and underscored their confidence during this off-season by re-signing Jarry and trading his competitor for the job, Matt Murray, to Ottawa. Eight staff members at NHL.com don't seem to think quite as highly of him, however. They were asked to identify the goalie they believe will be the NHL's best in three years and ended up offering five candidates, none of them Jarry. The writers singled out Igor Shesterkin (New York Rangers), Andrei Vasilevskiy (Tampa Bay), Robin Lehner (Vegas), Connor Hellebyuck (Winnipeg) and Carter Hart (Philadelphia). If you lose even a millisecond of sleep over Jarry's exclusion from that list, it's safe to assume you're more upset about it than Jarry likely is.
• Zdeno Chara is going to end up in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and justifiably so. He's been a terrific defenseman for more than two decades, and is a big part of the reason Boston was able to win a Stanley Cup in 2011. Whether he'll be back for a 23rd season still isn't clear, however. If he is, it likely will be with the Bruins, but Chara's been on the market for a while now and still hasn't gotten a contract. Whether that's because he hasn't been offered one or doesn't like any proposal that he's received isn't clear -- it's even possible that he's debating whether he wants to keep playing -- but it's unfortunate that one of the major figures in the league during this century appears to be stuck in limbo, for whatever reason.
• One of the ideas that's been kicked around for the 2020-21 season is to have teams play back-to-back games against an opponent, with both games at the same site. That would help to hold down travel costs, which will be an issue at a time when clubs have lost so much revenue, and could reduce a bit of the wear-and-tear on players. Also, history tells us that the intensity level tends to rise when teams meet in consecutive games, and there's an obvious appeal to that. Conversely, most fans seem to prefer paying to watch an ever-changing cast of visiting opponents, so it's not clear how they would react to seeing the same team twice in two or three days. That might be where the league is headed, though, and if so, don't be surprised if talk of reducing the environmental impact associated with travel becomes part of the conversation.
• Although there hasn't been a starting date announced for training camps, players have begun informal workouts, and one of the most interesting is taking place in, of all places, Arizona. That's where two of the game's top young centers, Edmonton's Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews of Toronto, have been skating together for a while. Not surprisingly, they reportedly have attracted some company, including the likes of Jonathan Toews, Anthony Duclair, Matthew Dumba and Penguins legend Alex Galchenyuk. It's no surprise that Matthews is skating there, given that he's an Arizona native, and McDavid is a logical workout partner for him, since they're represented by the same agency. Oh, and the weather might have something to do with it, too. The temperature in Phoenix Monday was predicted to peak just below 80.