For one brief, shining moment, the Penguins resembled the team we’d all hoped they’d be last night. Taking full advantage of a sluggish Avalanche squad that was playing its third game in four nights, the Pens popped two goals past Mackenzie Blackwood during a glorious 19-second span of the first period.

Better still, it was the big boys who did the honors. At 8:28, Evgeni Malkin took a short pass from Ville Koivunen, knifed through the slot with a ballistic move that would’ve done Jaromir Jagr proud, and whipped the puck past Blackwood as he tumbled to the ice.

Vintage Geno.

On the ensuing shift, Sidney Crosby motored into the Avs’ end and baited the hook for a stumbling Josh Manson before slipping a picture-perfect pass to Bryan Rust at the far side of the net for an easy goal.

Bang-bang. The Pens were up 2-zip, courtesy of our Two-Headed Monster of yore.

Camelot revisited.

Alas, it wouldn’t last. Following extended pressure by our fourth line, Elmer Soderblom in particular, the Avs countered.

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Obviously, our Penguins aren’t off to the kind of start we’d all hoped for. Since blitzing the hated Flyers, 7-0, in the season opener and racing to a 5-1 lead against the Canadiens in game No. 2, we’ve been outscored by a whopping 20-12 margin in non-shootouts goals while stumbling to a 3-3-1 record.

Our regulation points percentage? An abysmal .357. A mark that I think accurately reflects our level of play.

Small wonder that we’re on the outside of the Eastern Conference playoff picture looking in.

A far cry from last season, when we shot out of the starting blocks with an 8-2-2 record. A start that helped to propel us to a second-place finish in the Metro and a playoff berth.

So what gives? Why are we struggling to keep our collective heads above water?

Too Many Cooks

I’ve touched on this ad nauseam but it bears repeating. POHO/GM Kyle Dubas way overstocked the forward ranks during the summer. Indeed, the Pens opened training camp with no fewer than 20 forwards with NHL experience, nearly all of whom had a legitimate claim to a roster spot.

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Perhaps it’s a little too early to label a game “must-win.” Especially since most of our competition are struggling with consistency issues as well.

However, with a troika of very challenging games dead ahead in Colorado, Vegas and Utah, the Penguins really needed to take advantage of last night’s match-up with the lowly Blackhawks.

The fact that we didn’t, or couldn’t, doesn’t speak well of our chances for a successful season. Indeed, in many ways the 5-3 loss harkened back to a similar defeat at the hands of a dreadful Hawks squad back in April of 2023. The one that ended our 16-season playoff run.

Statistically at least, the Pens didn’t play horribly. They attempted 62 shots to Chicago’s 34 and held a 27-20 edge in shots on goal. They more than doubled the Hawks in scoring chances (37-15) and held a significant edge in high-danger chances (16-9) as well.

Yet we lost.

Once again, sloppy, disconnected play was a culprit, particularly in our own end. Brought on, in no small part by a fierce Hawks forecheck and a corresponding unwillingness by the coaching staff to adjust. Not to mention a stale, rancid power play that misfired on four chances to run our string of futility to 16 scoreless man advantages and counting.

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The Penguins swung a minor trade today with Buffalo. In exchange for defensemen Caleb Jones and Daniel Laatsch, we acquired blueliner Ryan Johnson.

A 31st overall pick of the Sabres in 2019, the 25-year-old Johnson is a left shot who goes 6’1” 195 pounds. He played in 41 games with the Sabres as a rookie pro in 2023-24 and tallied seven assists to go with a plus-3. He registered some decent 5v5 metrics, including a 52.5 Corsi, 56.41 Goals for Percentage and 51.52 Expected Goals for Percentage.

Save for a pair of three-game stints, he’s spent most of the past couple seasons skating for Rochester of the AHL. Like recently acquired Spencer Stastney, Johnson is regarded as a plus-skater. Physical play is not his forte (11 hits in 47 NHL games).

The son of former NHL forward Craig Johnson, Ryan played collegiate hockey at the University of Minnesota.

Jones, 29, made the Pens out of training camp last season and did a decent job skating alongside rookie Harrison Brunicke before suffering a broken foot in the seventh game of the season.

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The Penguins snapped their three-game winless streak last night with a 2-1 shootout victory over Dallas at PPG Paints Arena.

Unlike the previous three contests, our guys tightened things up quite a bit and generally gave a good account of themselves in what proved to be a low-event affair in terms of offense.

Connor Dewar broke a scoreless tie at 1:57 of the third period with a nice individual effort. After lugging the puck through the neutral zone, the plucky Pens forward sliced across the high slot in the Stars’ zone. With no clear-cut passing options, Connor flung a backhander that glanced off the stick of hulking defender Liam Bischel and fluttered over the blocker pad of Stars netminder Jake Oettinger.

The Pens came within 30 seconds of making the lead stand up. However, with Oettinger pulled for an extra attacker, Tyler Seguin deflected a Jason Robertson blast past Arturs Šilovs to force overtime.

I’m not gonna lie. When the game went to a shootout, I pretty much lost all hope, given not only our goalie’s sorry track record in such affairs but those of our shooters as well.

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Back in the early 1970s, then-Penguins owner Tad Potter wryly noted that his team must’ve thought there was an energy crisis because they were only giving 85 percent.

While I don’t know if the same can be said of the current batch of flightless waterfowl, what energy our guys do expend is largely misspent on own-zone scrambles, neutral-zone follies and one-and-dones during the all-too-rare occurrences when we actually breach the offensive zone.

I’m not going to sugarcoat. Last night the Pens served up a stinker en route to a 3-2 shootout loss to the Blue Jackets.

A few sorry stats to chew on. According to Natural Stat Trick, the CBJ attempted 83 shots to our 49 and unleashed 45 shots on goal to our 22. And that was after a mild third-period push by our Pens. The numbers were much more lopsided through 40 minutes.

Only a brilliant, coming-of-age performance in net by Sergei Murashov (43 saves) enabled us to extract a point we otherwise didn’t deserve in the least.

For those keeping track, Bryan Rust and Evgeni Malkin were our goal-getters.

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