The Pittsburgh Penguins got three out of a possible four points during the Sweden trip against the Nashville Predators this past week and it was very much a mixed bag of process and results. They played one bad game, one very good game, lost another overtime game and then watched as their prized goalie prospect (Sergei Murashov) not only earned his first NHL win but also his first NHL shutout. All of it improved them to 10-5-4 overall through their first 19 games, giving them a .632 points percentage that is still good enough for seventh-best in the NHL overall and third-best overall in the Eastern Conference.<\/p>\n
That is significantly better than anybody would have anticipated or predicted when the 2025-26 NHL season began.<\/p>\n
Despite that strong record and place in the standings, and even with Sunday\u2019s win over the Predators, the Penguins are just 2-3-2 over their past seven games. When they lost in overtime on Friday against the Predators, and did not look particularly strong in doing so, there seemed to be a sentiment that the fast start had officially ended and the flaws of the roster were starting to show.<\/p>\n
That might be true. Perhaps to a certain point. Especially as it relates to the defense and the overall defensive play.<\/p>\n
But I am not quite ready to say that just yet.<\/p>\n
Mostly because I think we are still learning what this team is about and what it is. Not every 2-3-2 stretch is the result of a bad team. Even good teams will go through stretches where they lose a few games.<\/p>\n
The Penguins are also in a situation right now where injuries have taken several regular forwards out of the lineup, including top-six forwards Rickard Rakell and Justin Brazeau. Those injuries have not only hurt the team\u2019s forward depth but also created some line combination issues.<\/p>\n
But even with some more losses over the past couple of weeks they have still played strong hockey for long stretches of times in a lot of those games. The only truly bad start-to-finish games over the past seven games were really the game in Winnipeg and Friday\u2019s game against Nashville. Most of the other games had bad periods or bad stretches, but they also had a lot of good mixed in.<\/p>\n
Still, they are going to need points to help validate that.<\/p>\n
They are going to need more consistency to show they can play a full 60 minutes and not give away third period leads.<\/p>\n
They will have two chances to do that this week on home ice against two fascinating teams in the Minnesota Wild and Seattle Kraken.<\/p>\n
Minnesota is the first team on the schedule this week, and one the Penguins already beat this season. Their 4-1 win in Minnesota was arguably one of the best games the Penguins have played all season and helped send the Wild toward the bottom of the NHL standings. Since then Minnesota has gone on a 6-1-1 run and started to make its move in the Western Conference.<\/p>\n
The Wild were always better than the early season struggles indicated, and they are finally starting to play like it. They do a great job pushing the pace offensively and have one of the best power plays in the NHL. They struggle defensively and have one of the worst penalty kills in the NHL. There should be opportunities for the Penguins to create offense.<\/p>\n
Stopping it will be the challenge.<\/p>\n
Seattle is an entirely different type of team.<\/p>\n
In terms of the standings, the Kraken have been one of the league\u2019s better teams this season. But when you dig around underneath the hood there really is not anything that stands out as overly impressive about them. They defend \u2026 fine \u2026 but they have almost zero offense to speak of and get badly out-chanced most games. Goaltending is one of the biggest things keeping them high in the standings, and even that is starting to slow down a little. They are beatable and vulnerable despite their strong early season record.<\/p>\n
Both teams have also struggled a bit on the road owning a 6-7-3 record between the two of them away from their home buildings. The Penguins by comparison are 5-2-1 on home ice.<\/p>\n
The other big obstacle for the Penguins will be the fact both games will be back-to-backs. While they will come after a stretch where the Penguins only played two games in over a week, the extra time off comes with travel to and from Sweden and two games there in the middle. Fatigue and being tired could be a concern in the second-half of that back-to-back stretch of games. You want to see the Penguins get at least one win out of that, and perhaps find a way to squeeze out at least one point in the other game. Getting at least three points this week would keep them on a 105-point pace a quarter of the way through the season. That would still be a strong start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pittsburgh Penguins got three out of a possible four points during the Sweden trip against the Nashville…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[4687,385,99,19552],"class_list":["post-297094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-analysis","tag-nhl","tag-sports","tag-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}