Coming off a stretch of 7 of 8 away from The Bird House, the Pittsburgh Penguins return home to the CONSOL Energy Center tonight to host the Boston Bruins (7:00 PM EST) and kick off a stretch where they'll play 7 of their next 10 games at home.
The Bruins -- 7-3-1 on the year so far -- will pose a good challenge for the Pens' tonight. They've been fantastic defensively, while just getting enough offensive contributions to win.
For their part, Pittsburgh has done a better job of getting to its game the last two times out, against the Anaheim Ducks and Phoenix Coyotes, respectively. And that's true even if they split those games.
Brent Johnson is going to get the call in the net for the Boys of Winter tonight.
Undoubtedly, he'll match up opposite one of the few guys in the league who can say he has better statistics than Johnson this year -- Boston netminder Tim Thomas, who's been off-the-charts white hot this season to-date.
The Bruins will be missing forwards David Krejci, Marco Sturm, and Marc Savard, the latter of which has been back on the shelf this whole season after having some recurring concussion symptoms this summer following the blow he took to the head last March on a hit from Pens' forward Matt Cooke.
Savard's case is a bit of curious one, since he returned to play in the post-season for the Bruins last year seemingly without any problems. For some reason, though, he began to have issues again this past summer while preparing for this season.
Pittsburgh recalled forward Chris Conner yesterday and he joined the team for the morning skate today. He isn't expected to be in the lineup, though, and instead was brought up more for insurance, since several members of the team have been battling the flu bug recently, including Johnson and Hilary Duff's husband, among others.
(Who doesn't think Comrie just wanted to say home and have his wife take care of him? Ahem.)
It looks like Evgeni Malkin is going to play tonight --- this after leaving yesterday's practice early while he still deals with a bit of a sore knee.
If Geno can get it going again, it might take some of the attention in Pittsburgh and national media circles off goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, whose continued poor play has kept him on the short list of topics associated with the Penguins worth talking about.
Fleury has acknowledged having just about no confidence right now, but he's going to have to shake that off. Head Coach Dan Byslma has attempted to give him some rope to work out his issues, but it hasn't happened yet.
Whether Fleury is at the stage of his career now where he should be so affected mentally by a slump is a topic for another day, but in the meantime, Captain Sidney Crosby suggested yesterday that, like any player, Fleury needs to get into a groove for several consecutive games to shake out of his malaise.
Of course, in the immeidate aftermath of that, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Rob Rossi wrote an unnecessarily-hyped column in yesterday's editions saying that Crosby and Blysma -- who wouldn't commit to giving Fleury that many games in a row right now -- are at odds over how to deal with Fleury's issues.
In other words, play him for multiple games in a row regardless of the result, or ask him to recover his confidence bit by bit -- even if it takes a longer time -- will they ride the hot Johnson.
Personally, I think there's much ado about nothing on this point.
Crosby speaks the truth, in my estimation. Fleury probably does need an extended stretch to get back going. But I agree with Blysma -- Fleury has been so bad, you just can't afford to give that to him right now.
Blysma wants to see more from Fleury on the concentration and focus front -- starting in practice.
The time will come when Fleury gets his chance to get that many games in a row. Personally, I think Bylsma is handling it right. The Penguins need the points now. And better to wait to do it until the team is playing better overall without all the abject inconsistentcy they're showing all the time right now.
By then, let's hope Fleury's confidence problem doesn't go from the current 3-alarm stage its in to a full-blazing 5-alarm mess. For him and the franchise.
Recap tomorrow.
Let's Go Pens!
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