The Penguins open the 2026.27 campaign where last season ended: Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
\u201cComing off last year, and starting in Philly, is something that I think both sides were kind of hoping for. It’s fun,\u201d forward Blake\u00a0Lizotte said with a smile. \u201cDefinitely some sour feelings after last year, but it’s a new year, and we look at it as a chance internally to start that first building block, if you will, to build towards the end of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Penguins already have a strong foundation to work with, laid down by Jack Adams Award finalist Dan Muse and his staff, the future Hall of Famers, the exciting young players, and all the\u00a0pieces in between.<\/p>\n
Despite low external expectations, the Penguins flipped the script and returned to the playoffs, falling Flyers in six games after falling into a 3-0 series deficit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey had an awesome year,\u201d said new addition Trevor van Riemsdyk. \u201cI think everyone was waiting for it to kind of fall off and come down to earth. They had a bunch of young guys, and obviously the superstars did what the superstars always do, and the young guys did a great job of contributing.\u201d<\/p>\n
While there were a lot of positives to take from the season as a whole, the biggest takeaway for Pittsburgh\u2019s management, hockey operations, and coaching staff is that the team still has a long way to go to return to legitimate contention. They all worked tirelessly this summer to try and improve the Penguins.<\/p>\n
President of Hockey Operations and GM Kyle Dubas acquired a handful of pieces that should fit well into the mix, and Muse and his assistants dug deep into how they can maintain their strong offensive play while becoming an average-or-above team defensively.<\/p>\n
Now, it\u2019s up to the guys in that dressing room each game to attack each day.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m most looking forward to the unknown, I think,\u201d defenseman Erik Karlsson said. \u201cWhat are the things that we’re going to identify early that we need to work on, and what are the things that we’re doing well and need to build on, and hopefully get off to a good start where we can do that as early on as possible and start growing right away, like we did last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd what those things are going to be, that’s the unknown. I don’t know, but that’s also the exciting part. I think you try and figure out what you have to do today to be successful tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sidney Crosby said hopefully, that will ultimately result in the Penguins going further than they did last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year was probably exceeding a lot of people’s expectations,\u201d the captain said. \u201cFor the guys that were here last year and went through last season, there should be a lot of belief. And for new guys coming in with opportunities that they have here, I think as a group, we’ve got to aim for that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Penguins open the 2026.27 campaign where last season ended: Philadelphia. \u201cComing off last year, and starting in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-296460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}