Last Place Lightning Blank Penguins, 2-0

The Penguins threw 15 shots at Tampa Bay Lightning netminder Mike Smith in losing to the last-place Bolts, 2-0, last night at Mellon Arena.

Which makes about 12 more than the number of guys in a Penguin uniform who actually showed up to play.

Continuing a miserable stretch of peformances, the Penguins again went down to a bottom-feeder team on their home ice by failing to win puck battles and not working hard enough to create scoring opportunities.

Concern?

You bet.

Pittsburgh's continuing poor play reduced Ryan Malone's first game back in town, and the return of Ryan Whitney to the Penguin lineup, to sideshows last night. Malone was mostly a non-factor, short of him trying to be physical with Evgeni Malkin. Whitney didn't look terribly rusty, but having him in the lineup obviously wasn't enough to pull the rest of the squad up by their bootstraps to victory.

Penguins coach Michel Therrein said after the game last night that the players don't have the right attitude, indicted them for "complaining about each other on the bench, on the ice", and said they better "wake up".

Complaining about each other?? That's not the Penguin team I know from the last 2 years.

I don't know what it is, but the squad is definitely in a funk, and once these things go on as long as they have, they aren't easy to get out of. It's bad enough the Penguins aren't working as hard as they need to on the ice, but if things have reached the level of some internal bickering among the players ..... not good.

This is new territory for Pittsburgh, for sure.

With the loss, they fell to 18-12-4 overall, and still sit marooned in 4th place in the Atlantic Division and 7th in the Eastern Conference. The fortunate part for them is that, for as bad as they've played, they still only sit 7 points behind the division leading (and 2nd in the conference) Rangers. They have time to get out of their slump and re-establish themselves, but they better start doing it soon.

It's hard to say what's going to get the squad going again. Hard work is usually what gets a team out of a slump. It wouldn't be any different for the Penguins, especially since their lack of hard work is their primarly problem right now. They have plenty of guys who know how to compete. They just need to get back to it. It won't be easy with back-t0-back games this weekend against New Jersey and Montreal, but the Penguins have no choice.

If they want to save their season, they can't continue to play like they have.

More over the weekend at some point.

Happy Holidays everyone.