Penguins
Penguins’ Last Stand? Long, Pivotal Road Trip Looming

CRANBERRY — The Pittsburgh Penguins are aware of just how precarious their situation is.
How they are a full four points out of the second wild-card berth in the Eastern Conference playoff field going into Thursday’s games, with no fewer than four teams separating them from Columbus, current occupant of that final postseason spot.
It is not where the Penguins expected, let alone hoped, to be in mid-January, and not someplace they can stay for long if they intend to play beyond the regular season for the first time since 2022.
They also understand the opportunities to climb in the standings that were squandered when they went 1-3-1 on their recent homestand, and how that has ratcheted up the stakes for the seven-game road trip that begins Friday evening in Buffalo.
By the time they return home from the trip finale Jan. 29 in Salt Lake City, the Penguins should have a pretty good feel for whether they’ll be poised to make a serious run at the playoffs or whether elimination from contention is a mathematical inevitability.
“We kind of have to look at it (as make-or-break),” defenseman Matt Grzelcyk said after practice Thursday at UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex. “We’re kind of running out of runway here, and we don’t want to be throwing points away, especially when we feel like we’re kind of outplaying teams and let them off the hook the last two games.”
If the Penguins have an objective for how many points they’d like to take out of the next seven games, they’re not sharing it publicly. But given that they are 6-10-5 away from PPG Paints Arena in 2024-25, there’s not much reason to believe they’ll pad their total by, say, a dozen.
Still, their lineup of opponents isn’t especially daunting, since five of the seven clubs they’ll face — Buffalo, Anaheim, Seattle, San Jose and Utah — currently sit outside of the playoff fields in their respective conferences. All of those teams have fewer points than the Penguins’ 44.
Then again, three of the four teams that got the better of the Penguins on home ice between Jan. 7 and Jan. 14 trailed the Penguins in the overall standings before reporting to PPG Paints Arena, proving that precedent isn’t necessarily predictive.
While their inability to capitalize on having five games in a row at home could contribute to them sitting out the playoffs for the third consecutive year, right winger Bryan Rust said the Penguins aren’t dwelling on what could have been.
“You move forward,” he said. “You learn, and you move forward. You take your lessons, and you apply them moving forward. You can’t look back.”
If they look past the first two games of the trip — in Buffalo Friday and Washington Saturday — the Penguins will see that they’ll spend more than a week outside the Eastern time zone, with a swing through California before stops in Seattle and Utah.
The Penguins went 2-2 in the U.S. portion of the Pacific time zone last season, with victories in Anaheim and San Jose and losses in Los Angeles and Seattle, but more than a few clubs from this side of the continent have returned from Western trips with little more than some leftover meal money.
For good reason, most of the time.
“Obviously, the travel (is an issue) and usually you’re playing a lot games in a short number of days,” Grzelcyk said.
It was before just such a venture across the continent that former Penguins center Petr Nedved suggested that it would be good for team unity because “there will be a lot of bondage going on.”
While Nedved didn’t quite express it correctly, his point about the benefits of teammates spending time together was accurate.
“This is a good opportunity to continue to come together as a team,” Grzekcyk said. “Going on a long road trip like this can do that for you.”
Of course, winning can bring a team closer, too
And how often the Penguins do that during the rest of the month likely will have an impact on how long president of hockey operations/GM Kyle Dubas is willing to keep this group largely intact.
Come home in, or even close to, a wild-card berth, and Dubas might be less likely to make wholesale changes as the March 7 NHL trade deadline approaches.
“It’s obviously a really important road trip for us,” Beauvillier said. “We’re going to be ready for it. Collectively, we believe in our group. We believe we can be a playoff team.”
The Penguins are about to get a chance to prove it.