Plenty of Penguins Trade Talk in Lots of Places … With One Exception

The Pittsburgh Penguins will convene at UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex in Cranberry for a practice this morning.

As the players gather in the locker room and go through their pre-workout routines, they will converse, as coworkers are wont to do.

Some discussions likely will focus on how teammates spent their day off Sunday. Others, on the results and news from around the league Sunday. A few might even touch on more serious issues, like the burgeoning tariffs showdown between the U.S. and Canada.

What will not be talked about, players say, is the rampant speculation about personnel changes president of hockey operations/GM Kyle Dubas will make between now and the NHL trade deadline March 7.

Oh, it’s not because they are oblivious to all the talk about trades Dubas might negotiate – that would be impossible, given that there’s no escaping it online, in the newspapers and on TV – but rather that they see no point in broaching the subject.

“It’s not talked about in the room,” veteran center Kevin Hayes said bluntly.

That echoed the assessment of forward Blake Lizotte.

“I think it’s more on the outside,” he said. “In terms of where our focus and energy are, it’s in this room and what we’re doing here.”

What they’re trying to do is to climb back into an Eastern Conference wild-card berth, a task only slightly less daunting than, say, a salmon trying to make its way up Niagara Falls to reach its spawning ground.

The Penguins are seven points behind Columbus, which holds the second wild-card spot in the East. The Blue Jackets also have a game-in-hand on them, and there are five other teams between Columbus and the Penguins in the conference standings.

Still, “highly unlikely” isn’t the same as “impossible,” which is why Rickard Rakell believes the Penguins can block the outside noise and focus harvesting as many points as they can in the weeks ahead.

“We know that if we win some games in a row, we can still be in it,” he said. “I don’t feel like it’s like that right now, because we still feel like we have a shot and we’re still in the fight. If we would have been 20 points out of it already, then it probably would have been a different story.”

The Penguins, who will face New Jersey Tuesday evening at PPG Paints Arena, have won back-to-back games for just the second time since early December. Their story — and their playoff prospects — would be decidedly different if they had picked up points a little more often, especially when they faced other clubs likely to sit out the playoffs.

That’s something they haven’t managed, however. Witness how they lost three in a row to the likes of Anaheim, Seattle and San Jose on their recently concluded road trip, during which they went 3-4.

“The trip didn’t go as planned, (but) we played some good hockey,” Hayes said. “Have to stick to it. It’s easy to get streaky in this league. Hopefully, the streak is for wins and not losses.”

While two consecutive victories is more of a smudge than a streak, a club can’t win three in a row until it has won two, or four until it has won three. The Penguins’ playoff pulse might be faint, but with 28 games remaining in the regular season, they’re not ready to write off the race and shift their attention to who might still be around after 3 p.m. on March 7.

“We’re viewing this like it’s close in the standings and we still have a good amount of games left,” Rakell said. “The focus is just on us trying to win hockey games and not so much on what’s being talked about.”

That figures to remain the mindset until mathematical elimination from contention becomes inevitable.

“You take one game at a time,” Lizotte said. “You don’t look too far ahead or too far behind. You learn from mistakes you’ve made along the way, especially this year, and try to get better every day. If you stop getting better, that’s when you’re dead.”