By next Friday night, all of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ regular season games will have been completed. Soon thereafter, we’ll learn who, when, and where the Penguins will be playing in the postseason beginning Monday, May 2nd.
Making the postseason for the 16th consecutive season cannot be overstated. It’s the longest current streak in all of professional sports. However, one can’t help but think that maybe the Penguins enter these playoffs as the bottom-feeders of the playoff teams.
Pittsburgh’s issues, as of late, are plenty. They’ve lost their number one goaltender indefinitely. Their secondary scoring has dried up. Most of their top-paid defensive players suddenly look lost and lack confidence. This is not an ideal time for all of this negativity to peak it’s ugly head.
On the bright side, Sidney Crosby is still playing at a level that no-mid 30’s player should be able to play. On almost any given night, he’s the best player on the ice for both teams. Kris Letang continues to age like fine wine even though his play lately has been a bit more careless than it has at most points this season.
Knowing all of this, how do the Pittsburgh Penguins, winners of three Stanley Cups in the last 14 years, stack up with the rest of the Eastern Conference despite an aging core?
Let’s start with their in-division playoff foes.
While not every playoff spot has mathematically been locked up, the eight playoff teams are a mere formality just waiting on the math to finally add up.
Out of the Penguins’ Metropolitan Division, the Carolina Hurricanes, New York Rangers, and Washington Capitals will be entering the playoffs.
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Carolina Hurricanes
The cream of the crop is Carolina. They’re a fun, young, fast team that has the makings of being a Cup contender for years to come if they can juggle salary cap concerns. They aren’t littered with top-10 players but they have a lot of near elite players and depth to go with it.
Sebastian Aho (76 points), Andrei Svechnikov (67 points), and Teuvo Teravainen (60 points) are doing the heavy lifting for Carolina. Tony DeAngelo, a talented young defenseman who had proven to be a locker room cancer for the Rangers, finds himself spear-heading a Carolina team destined to make a nice run in these upcoming playoffs.
I won’t name every player for Carolina but if you just take a scroll down their roster on any website, you’ll start to realize a lot of the names are solid pieces from top-to-bottom that any team would love to employ.
The biggest question now for the Canes is the status of starting goaltender Frederik Anderson. Anderson looks to have a lower-body injury but the nature and time frame of his injury hasn’t been released yet. Antti Raanta is the backup in Carolina and he’s been perfectly serviceable in that role.
It’s much like the Penguins though. Everyone knows that hot goaltending can carry a team in the playoffs, while cold goaltending can be their downfall. Raanta potentially having to shoulder the load could be the downfall for Carolina.
New York Rangers
The Pittsburgh Penguin killers.
After seeing New York conquer Pittsburgh three separate times in less than two weeks, not much confidence can be had about having to see the Blueshirts in a seven-game playoff series.
Then again, the slightest sign of doubt in a Mike Sullivan-led hockey team usually leads to a surprise outcome on the other end. If this is Pittsburgh’s first round opponent, could the Penguins win in an underdog role? Much of that will depend on the play of Rangers goaltender Igor Shesterkin.
Shesterkin made some enemies in Pittsburgh by waving goodbye to the Penguins as he sent them off the ice in their final regular season meeting. Shesterkin is likely the favorite to win the Vezina but has seen his play slightly dip from the heights he was reaching early on in the season.
New York presents a threat up front simply because they’re a faster team than the Penguins. They even remind me a lot of the previous Penguin Cup teams because they skate circles around a Penguins team who thinks they’re still that young, fast team.
Chris Kreider has 50 goals on the season. Artemi Panarin and Mika Zibanejad have 20 goal seasons. So the Rangers have plenty of other depth scoring.
It’s a dangerous team that the Penguins will struggle with but weirder things have certainly happened.
Washington Capitals
Here is where things get hairy. This Capitals team would’ve been considered dead in the water a few weeks ago. They just feel like an old, stale team that benefitted from a weak bottom half of their division.
However, over recent weeks, they’ve found a goal scoring boost and are putting it on bad teams. They’ve also lost games convincingly to playoff bound teams. They might just be the equivalent to the Penguins in a lot of ways.
Washington does have a bit of a goalie controversy though. They don’t have a clear number one after both Ilya Samsonov and Vitek Vanecek have struggled to put a form grasp on the notion. Samsonov has 35 games started while Vanecek has 36. Anytime a team has two goalies playing identical, you don’t really have a goalie you trust.
They still have an offense capable of hanging in the playoffs though. Alex Ovechkin is still doing it with 47 goals this season. Evgeny Kuznetsov, John Carlson, and Tom Wilson continue to lead the way as usual for Washington.
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Now, we head into the opposite division where the other four teams will reside from.