The Penguins have been trying something radically different on the power play lately.
They've been looking like they're actually intent on scoring when they have an extra man, rather than trying to set up a three-point jump shot from the corner.
It doesn't always work -- they were 0-for-3 with the man-advantage during their 3-1 loss to Washington Tuesday at PPG Paints Arena -- but eight of their 27 shots in that game came during the four minutes and 45 seconds when they were on power plays.
For a team that had, at times, seemed intent on perfecting the art of overpassing when it had an extra man, that's progress.
Still, the Penguins have scored just once in in 25 power plays during their past nine games and are converting just 14.3 percent of their chances, tying New Jersey for the seventh-lowest mark in the NHL.
Perhaps, then, it is time to try something different.
Not necessarily a move likely to have a huge impact -- or one that's even guaranteed to work out, for that matter -- but an experiment whose time has come.
OK, perhaps it actually arrived a while ago, although it's not clear that it ever has gotten serious consideration from the decision-makers.
Regardless, It is time to give Zach Aston-Reese an opportunity to prove whether he can be a productive net-front presence on the power play.
Not so much because he has a goal in each of his first three games since returning from offseason shoulder surgery -- not even his agent and immediate family members expect him to maintain that pace -- but because Aston-Reese has qualities that could make him effective in that role: He has decent size (6 foot, 204 pounds), is willing to absorb the punishment that would accompany those duties and might have more of a scoring touch than he's shown so far as a pro, having put up 31 goals in 38 games during his final season at Northeastern.
None of that means he'll ever be a consistent goal-scorer at this level and he certainly shouldn't move directly into a spot on the No. 1 unit, but Aston-Reese merits at least a little ice time when the Penguins have a man-advantage. Considering how ineffective the power play has been for most of this season, is there really that much of a downside to experimenting with him there?
Aston-Reese, it must be noted, does not have so much as a second of power-play ice time in 2020-21 -- Sam Lafferty is his only teammate who shares that distinction -- and has had extremely limited work on the man-advantage unit during his time with the Penguins.
He averaged 32 seconds of power-play time per game in 2019-20 -- 20 teammates had more -- and that was up from seven seconds per game in the previous season, when he tied Bryan Rust and Jamie Oleksiak for 21st place on the team.
During his first partial season in the NHL, he averaged 30 seconds per game, which placed him 16th on the Penguins.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given those numbers, Aston-Reese does not have a power-play goal in 119 NHL games.
Of course, considering how few of those the Penguins have scored in recent weeks, making some personnel adjustments doesn't seem like an outrageous idea. Indeed, the Penguins gave Mark Jankowski 68 seconds of power-play work Tuesday, and he doesn't have a goal in 13 games.
Trying Aston-Reese when they're up a man wouldn't seem to be any more of a risk than using Jankowski then was.
Starting him on the No. 2 unit would be logical, just to see how he handles an expanded role, after which it could be determined if he should get more -- or less, or no -- playing time when the Penguins have an extra man.
A case could be made that there was no urgency to use him in the net-front job during previous seasons; after all, he had just 18 goals in 116 career games before his surgery, and Patric Hornqvist already was handling that duty pretty well most of the time.
But Hornqvist is gone and Aston-Reese is back -- and in a pretty big way.
He'll enter Thursday's game against the New York Islanders at PPG Paints Arena with a career-best three-game goal-scoring streak.
Being on that kind of roll surely has imbued Aston-Reese with some extra confidence.
Seems like it might be a good time for Mike Sullivan and his staff to show a little more in him, too.
