CRANBERRY, Pa. -- The Penguins sit on the outskirts of the playoff picture as the NHL comes out of the All-Star break.
With a 22-17-7 record, their 51 points have them seven points back of the Red Wings for the final wild card spot but only five points back of the Flyers for the final of three spots in the Metropolitan Division. They have four games in hand over both teams -- do the math, and if they actually take advantage of those games in hand, they can overtake either.
The Penguins are far from the only team in the hunt. Between the Flyers' 56 points and the Penguins' 51 points in the Metropolitan Division race sits the Islanders with 54 points after a 3-2 win over the Maple Leafs on Monday. The Devils and Capitals are both tied with the Penguins in points, albeit each with one extra game played. The Sabres and Canadiens, with 48 points each, aren't out of the wild card race either.
The website MoneyPuck.com runs a playoff odds program that looks at a team's remaining schedule and calculates their chances of making the playoffs with a pretty decent degree of accuracy in years past. Right now they have the Penguins with the fourth-best odds in the division with a 58.6% chance of making the playoffs.
Despite the odds tilting slightly in the Penguins' favor, they have their work cut out for them if they want to secure as spot in the postseason and avoid two consecutive seasons of missing the playoffs. With the standings as tight as they are, and a number of divisional matchups still on the schedule, the rest of the season might take on a playoff feel.
"It's going to be fun hockey down the stretch," Bryan Rust told me after Monday's practice at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex. "I think so many teams, especially in the east are in that race, and most of our teams that we play are in the east. So everybody's definitely going to be fighting for points, fighting for positioning down the stretch. It's going to be intense."
It's not unlike the way the last month had gone for the Penguins before the All-Star break/bye week began. The Penguins played 14 games in the month leading up to the break -- five against divisional opponents, and nine in-conference. They went 7-4-3 in the 14 games, including a 3-1-1 record against their own division and 5-2-2 record against the conference. They outscored opponents 45-36 over the course of the month, and got pretty good goaltending in the form of a combined .911 save percentage.
"(Playoff-style hockey) has kind of been our mindset for last month or so," Rickard Rakell said. "That's what it's going to take for us to grab those important points. I also think that's been a mindset for us coming back in games that have been close, just to get points and get to overtime or a shootout or whatever. Coming down to the last part of the season, I feel like that's where most teams push their game plans forward."
If any part to the Penguins' "game plan" could use the push over this last stretch, it's the power play. The power play has been problem No. 1 all season, operating at a 13.1% success rate. It ranks 31st in the entire league, above only the 12.4% Blackhawks power play. Even as the Penguins started to find a little more success over the last month of the season, the power play remained immune from that progress. They only scored six power-play goals on 51 opportunities in the last month before the break, only a 11.8 % conversion rate.
The Penguins at least appear to be mixing things up as far as the power play units go when the season picks back up Tuesday against the Jets at PPG Paints Arena. The new units are similar to the ones they used in their last game against the Canadiens prior to the break, albeit with a slight tweak as Reilly Smith appears set to return to the lineup. The past two days of practice has seen a top unit of Kris Letang, Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel, Bryan Rust and Smith, while the second unit includes Erik Karlsson, Evgeni Malkin, Lars Eller, Jeff Carter and Rakell.
"We've tried a number of different things with the top unit," Mike Sullivan said. "Moving players around in different positions, moving certain players in and out of that top unit to try to gain some consistency. We just don't feel like it's lived up to the expectation that we all have, and our players are included in that. So I think they get it. When we don't have success, then change is inevitable."
Obviously, if the Penguins can manage to put together even an average power play, that would go a long way toward picking up more of these remaining points and securing a playoff spot. Had they managed to have an average power play from the start, maybe they would find themselves comfortably in a playoff position at this point.
But there's also something to be said for teams that can catch their stride at this point in the season, and get hot at the right time. The teams that dominate throughout the regular season don't always go onto have playoff success. Looking at the Presidents' Trophy history alone, only eight of the 37 winners of the regular-season champion award have gone onto win the Stanley Cup. Of the past eight winners alone, two have been eliminated in the first round (including last season's Bruins) and the other six have been eliminated in the second round. When a team has been rolling all year and secure in their spot as the regular season comes to an end, it can be challenging to adjust and change gears when the playoffs begin.
Sometimes, if a team has to claw their way into the playoffs, that can be a benefit when the playoffs begin and the team has been playing with the intensity needed for weeks already. Last year's Panthers squad is an example of that, after they just barely made the playoffs in a tight wild card race then went on to make the Stanley Cup Final.
The Penguins are hoping to follow a similar path -- catch fire when it matters, then carry that into a postseason run.
"Florida had a great run last year," Noel Acciari remarked. "I think they found their stride at the right time, and you can kind of see that and know what can be done. I think we have the right people in this locker room that we can do that. Guys have done that before, won Stanley Cups. They know what it takes. We all believe in here, and I think we're going to have a good push here in the second half."
"It's like if you're playing hockey that really matters, it kind of helps you," Ryan Graves added. "You get into those games, it's like you've kind of been in that mindset for an extended period of time. Sometimes it just works like that. It can work the other way too. Every year is different. We're our own group, and we're just trying to find our way. We believe in what we have in this room."
Sullivan said that leading up to the All-Star break, he thinks the team had "some moments" where they played some pretty good hockey, and it often paid off in the standings. The challenge now is going to be finding that game more consistently.
"Not just game to game, but period to period and shift to shift," Sullivan said. "That's our biggest challenge coming out of this break. It's a huge opportunity for us to come together as a team."
