PENGUINS

It's now been five games since the Penguins broke up the Ryan Graves-Connor Clifton pair, a move that coincided with the arrival of Brett Kulak and the end of Jack St. Ivany's recovery from his foot injury.

Graves has sat out all five games since, and Clifton has gotten into just one of the five, getting in for St. Ivany in the Penguins' game in Montreal. 

The Penguins will use the same defense pairings on Sunday in Chicago, and Graves and Clifton will again sit. Of course, Kulak needed to get in at some point post-trade, so the Penguins could see what they had. Same goes for St. Ivany, who played well in camp and was seemingly tracking toward pushing for a spot out of camp. 

But at the same time ... the changes the Penguins made weren't a straightforward call. Graves and Clifton has been playing well prior to being banished to the press box.

"You know, two other guys are coming in, and so that's sometimes that's the case," Dan Muse said when I asked why Graves and Clifton remain out of the lineup. "You get that sometimes when guys come back from injury, a player comes here through trade. Players are coming in, and somebody has to come out. And so that pair came out, and it wasn't so much anything that they were doing. It was just we're going to see (Kulak and St. Ivany), and I think those two have played well in the games that they've been in."

Clifton told me the same thing -- the message he was given about the scratch was that they wanted to get St. Ivany in. It wasn't about anything he did wrong. That doesn't make the move any less frustrating, though.

"You just deal with it and stay ready," Clifton told me on Saturday. "It's obviously frustrating, just because Gravy and I finally started building something. There was a four-game stretch that was really good, and then it was the back-to-back, and we got pulled right after that, and then we lost a couple more games. I got thrown into the Montreal game, and we didn't play well. So you can't feel good after that. It's a little frustrating, just because watching a lot of games now and the lineups been kind of stagnant, and it's the same thing tomorrow. So, I mean, it is what it is. I'm gonna be OK. But it's frustrating."

In the week leading up to that back-to-back, Graves-Clifton led the Penguins' pairings in different on-ice metrics, with the Penguins controlling 64.71% of shot attempts, 73.81% of unblocked attempts, 69.23% of all shots on goal and 72.86% of all expected goals, while seeing exactly zero offensive zone starts and no goals scored for or against -- really, what you'd want out of a third pairing, eating up defensive zone starts and at least maintaining momentum.

That's par for the course for the whole season, too. Of all the pairings the Penguins have started games with, the Graves-Clifton pairing leads in shares of shot attempts (55.02%), unblocked attempts (60%), shots on goal (60.18%), and expected goals (61.06%) while seeing only 33.33% of their shifts start in the offensive zone, the lowest share on the team.

"I like playing with Cliffy," Graves told me just before they got taken out of the lineup. "I think we both play a similar style of game, which helps. We play straight lines, we play hard, we think the game similarly. We just want to move pucks quickly. We want to break out as efficiently as possible. We don't need to be fancy. We're not trying to beat guys one on one. We're just moving pucks quickly. We're physical, just playing straight-line hockey that is effective. We think similarly and kind of play off each other."

"We finally built some chemistry," Clifton added of that success. "I played with, I don't know, five different guys at camp in games and practices, played the left for a little with (Harrison Brunicke). So I was all over the place. (Graves) went to Wilkes. And I was in and out. And then we were together, we finally got some chemistry. We were playing well, and for their reasons, we've been watching. And it is what it is."

Clifton said that the decision weighs more on him now, because it's well past the first 10 or so games of the season where there's a real feeling-out process, and the Penguins are nearing the midway point of the season and he's still sitting. But at the same time, he can't get too worked up about it.

"Obviously, I want to play," he said. "You try not to think and dwell on it too much, otherwise you can get consumed by it, you know? I know I'm not in, right? So I'm going to try to get reps in practice. We'll have a good skate tomorrow morning and get the legs back. We just did a hard skate out there. So it's frustrating, I mean, but it's whatever."