Penguins season in review.

Pen's finished their regular season with a whopping 106 points, tied for first in the division, and on a 4 game winning streak.This is exceptional for a lot of reasons, the main being the fact of course that half the team was dead for the last half of the season. It was a tale of two seasons for the Penguins, in the beginning times were a little rocky but not unstable, Fleury was struggling to get into his groove until early November the crowd helped him "FLEURY! FLEURY! FLEURY!" since then he never looked back. Sidney Crosby was playing the best hockey of his career and dominated essentially everyone and everything. Leading the team with Fleury's help to 12 straight regulation wins and 15 unbeaten games in a row, the supernova captain was also on a streak of his own. 25 straight games with a point or more scoring 50 points in that span. He was on a pace for 60 goals, and sadly is still the leading scorer on the team after only 41 games played. The streaks both ended in the end of December, spoiling a few Christmas's.

This is when the second half of the season came into play. The calendar turned to 2011, and all eyes were on the Penguins and Capitals, literally as this New Years day Winter Classic was the most watched hockey game of all time. Everyone saw it, and only a few people liked it, Crosby gets a blindside shoulder to the head that leaves him clearly dazed and then some. Penguins would lose the Winter Classic on "home" ice in Heinz Field 3-1, and 4 days later would lose their captain for the rest of the regular season after a less than punishing hit by Hedman of the Lightning ran Crosby's head into the boards. The turmoil had officially begun.


From this point forward, the Penguins season would be much, much bleaker. The hockey world decreed the team would be going nowhere without their molten hot centerman. Myriads of people claimed the season was over, but those people forgot there are 17 other skaters on this team any given night, and honestly probably stopped watching after he went down.To make matters worse, in the beginning of February the Penguins lost red hot center Mark Letestu for a month due to injury, then Evgeni Malkin tears both his ACL and MCL during a Sabres game and gets shut down for the whole season while he rehabs for next year. The team was now without it's two hottest and brightest stars and it's best remaining face-off man and the questions began to loom ever heavier over the heads of the Penguins. The season that was already in question, looked almost over if you weren't keen eyed enough.

Enter Dan "give me the Jack Adams" Bylsma, who as I've spoken on before, has taken this team through adversity and persevered to score the 2nd most points in team history, breaking 100 points in just the 7th time in franchise history, and tying the defending eastern conference champion Flyers for first place in the Atlantic. He did this without his two stars, and without half of the team as the injury bug that latched itself to the bloodflow of the Pen's during January did not jump off until the 3rd to last game of the season when it bit James Neal's hand and hopefully jumped onto the ice and got runover by a skate and murdered.

He did what many coaches have to do, fill holes from injuries with players on the AHL team to plug in the gaps. As a new player went down, another was called up from Wilkes-Barre, each doing their part to the best of their abilities using the same offensive and defensive scheme that took WBS to number 1 in the league and the most points in team history. In the end though, even some of those players got hurt, Dustin Jeffrey who was essentially sealing his position on the starting roster next year went down with a knee injury requiring surgery. Eric "Big Dog" Tangradi suffered a concussion at the hands of Handlebar Mustache during the debacle on Long Island and didn't return to play until game 82! Nick Johnson suffered his own concussion, and now even the reserves, needed reserves.

This team needed a hero, and it came from the most unlikeliest of players, in Tyler Kennedy. Kennedy has always had a shoot first mentality, a mentality that up until this season was not lucrative for the team and in most cases detrimental as shots would go wide or just straight at the goalie. Things were different this year for T.K as he enjoyed a career year overall, but let's take a look at his stats from the time Crosby went down compared to Chris Kunitz and Jordan Staal.

Jordan leads in points since Crosby's injury with 11 goals, 19 assists, 30 points and 4 game winning goals, Staal also played a ridiculous amount of minutes graduating from his 3rd line position to first in most cases with 21:42 average ice time.Chris Kunitz while missing a month of action was able to put up 10 goals, 10 assists and 20 points since Crosby was hurt. Tyler Kennedy however, was able to score 15 goals, 12 assists, 27 points, as well as 2 game winners but the most telling stat? Power Play goals. Prior to Crosby going down Kennedy had zero, afterward he put up 7 goals, nearly matching Crosby's 10 in 41 games. When the Penguins needed someone down low in front of the net picking up huge rebounds, Tyler Kennedy was there.

This teams power play was already one of the worst in the league heading up the injury of their stars, it finished 25th in the league at 15.8%. So there were questions as to whether or not this would get worse. With Kennedy's help it didn't, but without the boost of the superstars or other players it didn't improve much either. Though it is tough to deny that Tyler Kennedy came up huge in the last half of the season, and not a single person saw it coming. Tyler Kennedy gave Kris Letang a great run for Most Improved Player of the year, but overall this would still go to Letang.

Touching on special teams and the power play it's time to tout the prowess of the Penalty Kill. Pittsburgh finished the season leading the league in PK at 86.1%, up from 84.1% the season before, and way above the cup winning year in 08-09 at 82.7%. Thanks to the acquisitions of Paul Martin and Zybenek Michalek by Ray Shero to bolster an ailing defense with young legs. Michalek has blocked 146 shots this season and will probably double that number in the next season. He has two show stopping saves in the crease in one game that kept the Pens alive in a tough match up, and just finally at the end of the season found a way to start lighting the lamp, getting his first goal as a Penguin against Buffalo on March 8th, with a game winner and as Bob Errey put it: "He scored his first goal since the 8th grade!" Not quite that long Errey but it took 59 games in the regular season to break his snide.

Defensive improvement didn't just stop at PK% it also was bolstered in the Goals Against category, allowing only 199 goals and coming in 7th in the league. During the 09'-10' season the Penguins allowed 233 goals, when the Pen's won the cup in 08'-09' they had allowed 239 goals. You have to go all the way back to the 97'-98' season to find another time when they held teams to below 200GAA, they finished that season with 188. It is very clear that the addition of Michalek and Martin, with the overall all star improvement of Kris Letang, Brooks Orpik's tenacity, and the solid play of 6th men Ben Lovejoy and Deryk Engelland this defensive corps is one to be reckoned with and should be heavily watched in the playoffs.

This was one of the crazier seasons to witness with all these ups and downs. A season where Brent Johnson got into not just one but two fights, which brought Alexei Kovalev back to Pittsburgh along with new Penguins James Neal and Matt Niskanen and a season which brought the team to a new barn they would call home. Every game with the exception of a few Devil's and Islander games, the Wild game and the Stars game had exciting pace and were fun to watch night in and night out. Especially when the Pen's were going streaking. Yet even in the dark second half of the season, watching the Pen's come out game after game and still punish teams or hold onto 1 goal victories was an even bigger joy to watch. There is something about watching a group of guys overcome adversity that just hit's home with you, especially when it's the team you cheer for. Bylsma is proving himself as one of the best coaches in the league, taking the Penguins to their 5th straight playoff appearance, and taking them to new heights without all their crew.

Truly one hell of a regular season, but now it's time to focus on the arduous road ahead, The Stanley Cup Playoffs. This year will be no easy task, and it starts out with the Lightning at home for Consol Energy Center's first ever White Out on Wednesday night at 7pm. The cat is still in the bag on whether or not Crosby will play. Considering he has not started contact practice yet it doesn't look good but the hockey world could still be in for a surprise. According to the Lightning coach they're preparing as if Crosby will be undoubtedly out on the ice, it would be nice if this were the case. Round 1 is going to be a serious look at the toughness of this Penguins team, these two teams split their games this year but the Penguin's wins at home were very lopsided victories. The Penguins beat Tampa 5-1 on Nov 12, and 8-1 on Jan 5. Tampa Bay beat the Pens 5-3 on Oct 27 then finished the series with a 2-1 win on March 31 at home.

Wednesday night can't come soon enough. Let's go Pens!