Is It Panic Time for the Fading Pittsburgh Penguins?

April 6th, 2015 by Jonathan Willis Leave a reply »

The collapse of the Pittsburgh Penguins over the latter half of 2014-15 NHL season has been spectacular to behold. The team which sat a single point out of first in the Eastern Conference on January 1 has gone four games under 0.500 in the three-plus months since then and now finds itself in serious jeopardy of missing the postseason.

It’s been a stunning transition; looking at the 82-game pace in each segment, essentially the Penguins have gone from being the best team in the league to being the current edition of the Philadelphia Flyers or Colorado Avalanche:

Penguins through January 1: 23-9-5 (113-point pace) Penguins since January 1: 19-17-6 (86-point pace) What has happened, and what does it mean for the Penguins’ hopes of making the playoffs and then making some noise once they get there?

The first question is whether the drop-off in performance is driven by injuries, and the answer appears to be a resounding “no.” It’s not that the Penguins haven’t had injuries. They have, but the injury situation was actually worse early in the year when the team was winning games.

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