Bill Clement

The Penguins are looking like a team that realizes it is not as good as it was last spring when it blitzed through the Eastern Conference playoffs before losing the Stanley Cup to the Red Wings.

After an 11-4-1-1 start to the season the Penguins have slid to the point where entering their Jan. 18 game against the rival New York Rangers they're in 9th place in the Eastern Conference. I still believe Pittsburgh will make the playoffs, though as no higher than a five seed in the East.

Pittsburgh isn’t the team it was last season and I’m not sure many expected it to be especially with the key offseason free-agent losses of wingers Marian Hossa and Ryan Malone.

The Penguins are feeling the sting of not having Hossa, whom they acquired at the trade deadline last season. Pittsburgh thought it could sign him because it offered him $7 million a year and his choice of a contract that would have run five, six or seven years. But hoping to win a Stanley Cup this season, Hossa inked a one-year, $7.45 million contract with the Red Wings. The Penguins never intended for the deal to bring Hossa aboard to be one where they were renting a player but that’s what it turned out to be. Malone is also missed as he did a lot of big, powerful work off the wing.

The Penguins went the free-agent route and found replacements for Hossa and Malone in Miroslav Satan and Ruslan Fedotenko, both of whom had disappointing seasons with the Islanders. But both have not played as well as I thought they would have. (Fedotenko is out until at least early February with a broken hand sustained in a fight against former Penguins player Colby Armstrong)

There’s also the impact of Pittsburgh having two top defensemen go down to injury. Ryan Whitney had left foot surgery on Sept. 1. He’s back playing, but missed 31 games. Sergei Gonchar was injured on Sept. 20 in the Penguins' exhibition opener. He had surgery on his left shoulder on Oct. 2 and is out until at least March.

Then there’s the power play. It’s been bad. How bad? How about bad enough to produce only 42 shots while going 0-for-33 on the power play over a seven game stretch from Dec. 23 to Jan. 5. Over those seven games, Pittsburgh scored only eight goals.

When a team has great players like centers Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and it can’t score on the power play that’s always an indication it has lost its way in the energy department. Pittsburgh plays with little energy and emotion and I believe that’s traceable to the Penguins feeling they are not as good as they were last season.

Yet another area of concern is between the pipes. The Penguins haven’t gotten solid goaltending. Marc-Andre Fleury missed 13 games with a lower body injury sustained in mid November and the Penguins won only five times over that stretch.

But even when healthy Fleury has not played at the level he did last season. He’s had these sorts of lapses in focus and downturns almost every season and that’s puzzling. When Fleury is on his game, he’s a feared goaltender who was sensational in the playoffs last season. When focused, he is one of the best. But when he is off his game, he’s like anyone else — really beatable.

Fleury’s backup Dany Sabourin was able to do well for a short period of time but remember he’s a backup and not someone the Penguins can count on for long stretches. Subpar goaltending is death in today’s NHL because so many teams have good goaltending.

Scoring has also been an issue for the Penguins. Crosby and Malkin have slumped offensively. The struggles of Crosby are mostly because he doesn’t have a bonafide impact winger or wingers to play with. Crosby had that with Hossa in the playoffs last season and the results speak for themselves.

There’s a misconception about Crosby that he is a white-collar show dog but in a lot of games he is actually a grinder. Crosby’s a workhorse and he needs wingers to play with that match his work rate. He accomplishes a lot based on grunt work and sheer effort. So he needs wingers who match his effort. He’s mostly playing with Tyler Kennedy and Pascal Dupuis but that’s not a real good fit for him.

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Like Crosby on the first line, Malkin on the second line doesn’t have the greatest wingers in the world either. The team’s top winger, Petr Sykora, plays with Malkin but last season Sykora was the Penguins third best winger behind Hossa and Malone.

Crosby and Malkin are two of the top four forwards in ice time in the NHL so part of their dropoff offensively could be that they are feeling their workload. Minutes become tougher when your team is playing from behind in games. You have to work twice as hard to play catch up because you have to create so much more. When you play with the lead you don’t have to create as much.

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