Disco Dan turns two, and some injury news.

Dan Bylsma, great coach, or greatest coach? Michael Therrien at this point in the season two years ago had our Penguins just shy above .500 and a dark year in Pittsburgh was looming on the horizon. Enter Bylsma, who was coaching the WBS penguins at the time prior to being called up as the interim coach in 2009. Bylsma went on to coach the team to the playoffs, and their first championship since 1992.

Four months after becoming head coach Bylsma and the Penguins won the Stanley cup in dramatic game 7 fashion. Ray Shero and Pens nation never looked back. Why should they? In the recent CBC poll 21% of 318 players asked, said they wanted to dance with Disco Dan as a coach.

He's got the smile, he's got the wit, he's got the leadership skills, the know how, the work ethic, and many many more positive adjectives that describe him as a person, coach, and hockey player.

Bylsma played for the L.A Kings from 96-99 and for the Anaheim Ducks from 00-04 in his 9 year career as a winger in the NHL. He totaled 220 games for the kings scoring 9 goals and getting 17 assists. With the Ducks, Bylsma played 204 games scoring 10 goals and 21 assists.

As a head coach Bylsma has led only two teams, both being in the Penguins family of organizations, but assisted on two other clubs. He was assistant on the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks AHL team, and the New York Islanders, he also suffered his first loss as head coach on Long Island.

As he stands now, Dan Bylsma has led the Penguins to 100 victories in only 163 games. He is the third yet fastest Penguin coach to achieve this mark, and 5th fastest coach overal in the NHL. When he came in as interim coach in the championship season he led the team to an 18-3-4 record and onto hoisting the cup in the early weeks of June. In the 09-10 season he would go on to be 47-28-7 leading the team to the second round of the playoffs where unfortunately they were stopped short by a monolithic performance by then Hab's goalie Jaroslav Halak.

So far this year Bylsma has the Penguins sitting at 4th place in the league, with a record of 35-19-4 but his team this year went from all smiles and cheer to frown town, USA, population Penguins. Not for lack of coaching or work ethic, but from injury after injury after injury. 2010 was very good to the Penguins and Bylsma this season. Sidney Crosby saw a 25 game point streak, and the team turned around a slow start into 12 straight wins.

2011 on the other hand, has been nothing but adversity for the Penguins. Beginning with the Winter Classic on New Years day. A game that was supposed to be played in the early afternoon, which got delayed to 5pm, then finally 8pm before the final decision was made that it was best weather supporting as a night game. Crosby and Steckel meet each other and we all know about that. A game later Hedman heads Sid into the boards, and now he hasn't played a game since the first week of January, and isn't healthy enough to work out in hard skate sessions yet.

Now it's February, and the teams Injury woes are borderline disastrous. This month alone the Penguins have lost Evgeni Malkin for the year, Chris Kunitz (now day to day) going on 3 weeks, Arron Asham (day to day) for 2 weeks, Mark Letestu for 4-6 weeks however he participated in a light skate today, Dustin Jeffrey has gone down for a week and will possibly miss more time while getting used to his new knee brace, AHL prospect and recent call up Eric Tangradi is also still suffering from Concussion like symptoms after the Gillies run, and Mike Comrie has been wasting space on the IR all year for a hip injury.


To add insult to injury, Matt Cooke is serving his 4th and final game of a suspension against the Av's on wednesday, this off of the hit to Tyutin, and Eric Godard is serving 9 more games of a 10 game suspension for leaving the bench on Friday to come act as Brent Johnson's defense attorney. So the Penguins are down 9 players and only have 2 people left on 2 way contracts that can be called up from WBS to play for the 'guins. It is essential at this point the team get healthy and disciplined.

As stated before, the Penguins were in good shape for all of these terrible things to happen record wise. It's just that they really didn't need for any of it to go down like it did, then you throw a bus accident in New York into the mix and well things are the way they are. The team is more than dinged up, and it's morale is a little low with out it's all star leadership but they are still keeping their heads held high, in the hopes they overcome this adversity.

This team only needs to play .500 hockey to win out the rest of the year. Ironically, the opposite scenario of when Bylsma took over the team 2 years ago where they were at .500 hockey and needed a big boost to get to the end. Now all they need to do is simply limp in and use their exceptional work ethic on Defense and Penalty Killing to make a deep playoff run, a run that will hopefully include Sidney Crosby, and his six injured teammates.

The greatest thing Penguins nation could hope for right now is a solid turn around in the months of March and April heading into the post season, solid seeding and a deep deep run to the Cup finals to eventually hoist the giant chalice for a fourth time and second in three years, overcoming the odds and injuries to be crowned champions.