..And it wouldn’t be pretty either
The Penguins’ mini-renaissance of going 6-2-1 in their last nine games could be experiencing a stress test without a viable solution as a result of the injury suffered on Saturday night by Marcus Pettersson.
The team was off yesterday while returning from a road trip, so we’ll all wait with baited breath today for more insight on Pettersson’s status. There’s always the chance that today might not bring anything particularly useful, since the team may hide behind a vague “still under evaluation” non-update. That might be preferable to straight up announcing significant time missed, but then again ripping the band-aid off and disclosing the tough-to-digest news is going to have to happen at some point if the injury is as tough as it looked.
One thing sure and certain is that Pittsburgh doesn’t stand to bode well without their most stable defender.
Prior to the injury, Pettersson was averaging 22:18 time on ice this season. It breaks down to 19:16 per game at even strength (two seconds behind ES team leader Erik Karlsson) and Pettersson’s 2:54 per game short-handed made him the Pens’ leader on the PK by a sizeable margin.
Matt Grzelcyk, the next most played left handed defenseman, plays 16:55 per game at ES and only a bit role (0:51) of a few shifts per game on the PK. Free agent flop Ryan Graves only gets 13:23 at ES, barely more than 20-year old rookie Owen Pickering’s 13:12.
Adding that up shows how much of a luxury Pettersson has been for the Penguins. He can capably work with Karlsson or Kris Letang, turn in a solid 22 minutes per night and help shield the players behind him with more limited usage.
Removing that shield is not going to leave a pretty picture since the workload would be have to be redistributed. It would be a huge hole to replace and shove all those players up a notch into roles they are not well-suited for, nor likely to perform well in against tougher competition. Yet, there is no other option or good answer to the question on how to replace a player of nearly irreplaceable value on the squad.
The Pens aren’t that special defensively over the last nine games in their mini-turnaround, they’ve given up 28 goals in this span (3.11 per game), but it’s been a tale of two stories. Some of the games they’ve lost have bloated the average, in the six wins on this stretch Pittsburgh has only conceded 2.5 goals/game (15 total). The penalty kill has factored into the team’s success in a major way, it’s second in the league with a 91.3% rate of success to limit opponents.
A slight piece of good news comes with the holiday break. The Pens start playing every-other-day from tomorrow through December 23rd to squeeze in four more games before being inactive for four days around Christmas. Should it be a 1-2 week injury for Pettersson, the schedule allows a limited amount of respite where he wouldn’t have to miss that many of the team’s games.
Unfortunately, that break in the action isn’t going to last very long. Pittsburgh finishes out the calendar year of 2024 with three games in four days after the Christmas break, followed by an active start to 2025 where they play 10 times in the first 20 days of the new year.
One slightly bright side was that the team did manage well defensively playing most of last game down a defender against the Senators and found a way to take the game to overtime. The limits will be stretched and that much more likely to break should Pettersson’s absence be a lengthy one.
Personnel-wise, the Pens could look to get Ryan Shea back into the lineup, at which point a seventh defender from the minors for depth. Jack St. Ivany and Sebastian Aho are injured, which makes Filip Kral and Mac Hollowell the most likely candidates to get a call up to Pittsburgh. Better yet, it goes without saying, would be if somehow Pettersson has escaped a significant injury and could be back sooner than it looked and he didn’t need to go to the IR in order to fit in a replacement.
There’s more than a soft touch of irony that the Pens may prematurely lose Pettersson at this point of the year when they’ve been at their best. The invisible clock over his head is ticking loudly as an impending free agent likely to be moving on at some point, but an absence at this juncture would be a tough pill to swallow based on the timing.
Although different in the exact point on the calendar, the current situation has some unavoidable parallels to last year when Jake Guentzel left the ice as an injured Penguin in February and never played for Pittsburgh again, getting traded as he neared a return to health (and, in essence, managed wisely to protect his trade value). It’s way too early to even hint or suggest Pettersson’s situation is going to play out exactly in the mold of Guentzel, but it’s not an unreasonable idea to have nagging at this particular moment either as an example of what can happen with a player in a walk year for a team below the playoff line.
We’ll see if more is shed on Pettersson’s status today, but life in the near-future might put the Pens in a tough place with trying to move on without their steadiest and most competent defensive defenseman. They likely would have ended up at this point sooner than later due to the trade forces on his contract but it would be a cruel twist of fate that Pettersson was felled at the same time the team was steadying themselves.
Whether this injury proves to be a minor bump in the road or a clear and unfortunate turning point remains to be seen, but the clear result for the Pens is potentially only bad news on every front if Marcus Pettersson’s prognosis ends up leading to missed time. His absence is one that they won’t be likely to move on from in a positive way.
