Putting Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Rickard Rakell together has jumpstarted the Penguins top line.
The Pittsburgh Penguins finally snapped their six-game losing streak on Thursday night with a 2-1 overtime win against the Anaheim Ducks, and it was captain Sidney Crosby doing most of the heavy lifting with the Penguins’ only two goals. He has been playing his best hockey in recent games, and it has certainly helped that he has had some productive linemates playing on his wings.
That new look top-line is one of the few bright spots in a week that saw the Penguins go 1-3 and blow a couple of multiple goal leads.
With that said, let’s check in for the week and see whose stock is up and whose stock is down for the week.
Stock Up
The new top line. Putting Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Rickard Rakell together has injected some life into not only the Penguins’ top line, but also Sidney Crosby after an uncharacteristically slow start for the captain.
Loading up your three best players obviously comes with some risk and downside when it comes to your depth (and it is a problem), but given how tough things have been overall it might be their best chance to steal some wins if those three can just go off for 20 minutes a night.
In 35 minutes of 5-on-5 ice-time together so far this season that trio is outscoring teams by a 4-0 margin, has a 65.5 percent expected goal share and has been the one group that has been even remotely dangerous on the ice. It has also helped get Crosby back onto a point-per-game pace as he looks to continue that for another full season.
Rickard Rakell. The top line as a whole has been fantastic since being put together, but I want to single out Rakell again from that group just because his bounce back season has been such a nice development. When he first arrived in Pittsburgh in 2021-22, and then through the 2022-23 season, he looked and played like a legitimate top-line player with his goal-scoring, playmaking and creativity. He also seemed to have great chemistry with Crosby, something that has continued through the early part of the season.
His 2023-24 season was one of the bigger disappointments on the roster, and it looked like it was going to leave the Penguins with another bad contract to deal with in the coming seasons. Maybe it still will be a bad contract in the end, but with six goals and eight total points through 12 games he is at least looking like a useful player again. His 18 percent shooting percentage might be a little unsustainable, but his 9 percent mark from 2023-24 was also probably unsustainably low.
Stock down
Michael Bunting. Maybe he overperformed after the trade last year. Maybe it was an unsustainable run of production at the end of the season. But it is still staggering to see how invisible he has been so far this season. Even if he was not going to repeat what he did over the last month-and-a-half, he still has at least a solid track record of 20-goal, 40-50 point production in the NHL. So far this season he has one point, an assist, and has not stood out in any meaningful way.
Drew O’Connor. The big knock on O’Connor a year ago was that he would have extended stretches where he would be invisible and not make much of an impact, and then bounce back with a couple of games where he looked like a really good NHL player. Every player in the league, even the great ones, will go through peaks and valleys over the course of a season. But O’Connor’s peaks and valleys were a little extreme, and right now he is in one of those valleys. He has not recorded a point in six games while the Penguins have been outscored by a 13-4 margin when he has been on the ice during 5-on-5 play. That is the second-worst goals for percentage on the team among players that have played at least 100 minutes. Only Noel Acciari has been worse.
Team defense. None of the goalies have played particularly well this season, and that probably should have been expected. It also probably does not really matter that much given how bad the team has been in front of them defensively.
Over the past four games the Penguins are allowing 3.55 expected goals per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play, the third-worst mark in the league over that stretch. It is also worse than their overall season number of 3.23 expected goals against per 60 minutes, meaning that over the past week they have managed to defend worse than they were over the first three weeks of the season prior to that. The only thing that saved that number from being even worse was a Thursday night game against an objectively horrible Anaheim Ducks team that is one of the few teams that has been worse than the Penguins so far this season.