Game Preview: Pittsburgh Penguins @ New York Rangers 12/6/2024

Who: Pittsburgh Penguins (11-12-4, 26 points, 6th place Metropolitan Division) @ New York Rangers (13-10-1, 27 points, 4th place Metropolitan Division)

When: 7:30 p.m. ET

How to Watch: Streaming exclusive game on ESPN+ and Hulu

Pens’ Path Ahead: The Pens go back home for the next two games after this one. The next one is tomorrow night against Toronto and then Colorado comes to town on Tuesday. The Pens go for a quick two-game Canadian road trip after that, hitting up Montreal next Thursday and then over to Ottawa on Sat. Dec. 14th.

Opponent Track: The Rangers have had three days off since their last game, another humbling defeat (this time 5-1 to the Devils). NYR is just 1-6-0 since Nov 21st, making them the worst team in the NHL over the past two weeks.

Season Series: New York delivered a 6-0 beatdown to Pittsburgh on opening night. The two teams will link up again after tonight in the Garden on Feb. 7th, before the Rangers come to the ‘Burgh one more time this year on Feb. 23rd.

Hidden Stat: Anthony Beauvillier has 25 points (13G-12A) in 31 career games against New York. It’s the most goals and points the long-time former Islander has recorded against any one team (stick tap Pens PR).

Hidden Stat 2.0: The Penguins won their previous game @NYR back in April. They haven’t had back-to-back wins in the Garden since January and March of 2019.

Getting to know the Rangers

Projected lines

Artemi Panarin - Vincent Trocheck - Alexis Lafreniere

Chris Kreider - Mika Zibanejad - Reilly Smith

Will Cuylle - Filip Chytil - Kaapo Kakko

Adam Edstrom - Sam Carrick - Jimmy Vesey

DEFENSEMEN

Ryan Lindgren / Adam Fox

K’Andre Miller / Braden Schneider

Zac Jones / Jacob Trouba

Goalies: Igor Shesterkin and Jonathan Quick

IR: None

Potential Scratches: Johnny Brodzinski, Brett Berard

Player stats

(via hockeydb)

So uhh, what’s wrong with the Rangers?

After winning the Presidents Trophy last year and bringing back just about all their players again, most expected the regular season to be business as usual for New York. It even started out that way with a 12-5-1 record that made all appear well, but the good times didn’t last long.

The team is in disarray, defensively a mess and just about all of their highly paid players (ones not named Artemi Panarin, anyways) are slumping or outright struggling. The front office made a bad situation worse floating trade possibilities very publicly of some of the most important players on the team from the chemistry/leadership point of view. It’s been a disaster, made worse at every turn.

NYR has been getting good, or even better than good from a lot of their young players. Will Cuylle is breaking out into a very solid player. Alexis Lafreniere is on the rise, Kaapo Kakko has had his moments. Knowing this fact alone, you would think the Rangers would be on their way to another impressive season.

But there’s also this:

A major problem is that their next level of their highly-paid star players aren’t holding up their end of the bargain (again exempting Panarin). Kreider and Trocheck have taken steps back. That’s better than the outright debacles and borderline unplayableness of Zibanejad and Trouba who have cratered at the start of this season.

As mentioned in the recent Sunday Standings, former Penguin Reilly Smith has been a larger part of the problem than the solution for his new club in Manhattan. Stop me if you heard this before — Smith started off as an instant hit with his new team (9 points in his first 13 games of the season with NYR) but since then he has gone off a cliff. Smith has not scored a goal in the last 10 games, producing only three points in that span. He’s been made a healthy scratch once.

That puts his 2024-25 run so far almost note-for-note to what happened with Smith’s 2023-24 season in Pittsburgh. It was tremendous at first, Smith recorded 12 points in his first 13 games as a Penguin, only to see a drastic decline in performance that led to only seven goals and 23 points in the final 63 games of the season. That doesn’t bode well for his future prospects this season.

As a result of all of these converging factors, and in a shocking twist of fate, the Rangers tend to look a LOT like the Pittsburgh Penguins through the first two months of the season. There is one very drastic difference, but we’ll get to that in a second.

The big difference, of course, is quality of goaltending. NYR has Igor Shesterkin, one of the most consistent and most skilled goalies in the world and also Jonathan Quick, who has experienced a drastic and shocking late-career renaissance in New York. Pittsburgh has not been so lucky, dealing with the shattered Tristan Jarry and the largely unimpressive body of work Alex Nedeljkovic throws out there statistically.

However, goaltending can fade when over-stressed. Shesterkin’s season seemed to turn on a Nov. 7 start against Buffalo where he gave up 5 goals on 12 shots in 33 minutes and got pulled. From that night on, he’s just 2-7-0 with an .882 save% and 3.93 GAA. (Quick, oddly enough, has been immune from this with a 3-1 record, . 928 save% and 2.26 GAA in this period). Shesterkin was covering up a lot of issues in October, but the bottom has dropped out on him and the team in recent weeks, leading to the feeling of the season already spiraling out of control.

In the big picture, it’s a huge shocker and massive disappointment for the Rangers to be in the position they currently find themselves. The Pens haven’t made the playoffs in two years and didn’t add many impressive short-term fixes, it should not be completely surprising that they’ve been a bottom tier team, a tough season was always a possibility. The same can’t be said for New York, who were in the total opposite situation. They were the NHL’s absolute best regular season team last year with every indication and expectation that they would be in position to make a deep playoff run this year.

Now they have a poor team on the ice, trade rumors circling around their core players and leaders and several others in slumps. It’s a brutal place to be. Another loss tonight to the lowly Pens (a team NYR destroyed in the opening night) would only lead to that many more questions about how much longer they can carry on under the status quo.

And now for the Pens

Projected lines

FORWARDS

Rickard Rakell - Sidney Crosby - Bryan Rust

Drew O’Connor - Evgeni Malkin - Philip Tomasino

Michael Bunting - Blaze Lizotte - Anthony Beauvillier

Matt Nieto - Noel Acciari - Kevin Hayes

DEFENSEMEN

Matt Grzelcyk / Kris Letang

Marcus Pettersson / Erik Karlsson

Owen Pickering / Ryan Shea

Goalies: Tristan Jarry and Alex Nedeljkovic

Potential Scratches: Ryan Graves, Jesse Puljujarvi, Cody Glass

IR: none

—The Penguins do not have any players currently on the injured reserve now that Cody Glass is off it (and Jack St. Ivany is off the NHL team as a result). This is the first time since the season began that no one is on IR. The Pens used the above lines at practice yesterday in Pittsburgh before boarding their flight to New York, which should come as no surprise since the team is on a four-game winning streak.

Crosby at 1,300 games

Tonight is shaping up to be the 1,300th career game in Sidney Crosby’s career. How about a run to tie or even pass Jagr tonight?

Crosby could also tie or pass some all-time greats tonight and move up the NHL leaderboards in the following categories (per Pens PR):

• Assists with one franchise: Gordie Howe is 5th all-time in this category with his 1,023 assists for the Red Wings. Crosby sits at 1,022 assists with the Penguins
• Career multi-point games: Steve Yzerman is 7th all-time with 477 games with multiple points. Crosby is at 476 such games
• Even strength goals: Teemu Selanne scored 422 ES goals in his career, good with 12th all-time. Crosby has 421 ES goals currently
• Most combined points on a goal for a forward and defenseman: Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr combined to record points on the same goal 306 times, second all-time (Wayne Gretzky and Paul Coffey accomplished that feat on 350 occasions). Crosby and Kris Letang have been in on the same goal 305 times