Objectively speaking, the 2025-26 Pittsburgh Penguins appear to be a really good hockey team. By every major piece of data that exists to evaluate hockey teams, the Penguins rate extremely well across the league through their first 59 games this season.
Entering play on Tuesday their .636 points percentage is the sixth-best in the NHL and the third-best in the Eastern Conference.
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Their plus-30 goal-differential is fifth-best in the NHL.
They have 27 regulation wins, which is sixth-most in the NHL.
They are 9-3-3 against teams with a top-10 record.
They have a 51.7 percent expected goals share during 5-on-5 play, a rate that ranks eighth-best in the NHL. They are top-10 in pretty much every, goal, scoring-chance and possession-based metric during 5-on-5 play.
They have the NHL’s second-best penalty killing unit and the NHL’s third-best power play unit.
The goaltending has been, at the very least, competent.
They have a No. 1 center (when Sidney Crosby is healthy, that is), a No. 1 defenseman that has rediscovered his game, excellent scoring depth, good veterans, good young players, a lot of salary cap space in the future and more draft picks to work with than pretty much every other team in the NHL.
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If you knew nothing of the Penguins preseason expectations, or what they were supposed to play like this season, you would look at all of that and not hesitate to say, “wow, that team must be a legitimate Stanley Cup contender and in a really good position long-term.”
That would be a logical conclusion. It would be a sensible conclusion. It might even be the correct conclusion.
Yet, when you have watched the Penguins play on a nationally televised broadcast this season, or listened to a national writer or analyst talk about their approach to the trade deadline, you would never guess where this team is in the standings. They played two nationally televised games this past weekend and the first of those games on Saturday started off with a discussion about Evgeni Malkin’s future, and asking Kyle Dubas if there was any chance Malkin would be traded before Friday’s NHL Trade Deadline.
There is a constant rumbling of whether or not the Penguins will sell players like Anthony Mantha, or if veterans could be on their way out due to the ongoing rebuild or re-tool.
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You had T.J. Oshie saying they will fall out of a playoff position because of the injury to Sidney Crosby and how that will impact their power play, and Paul Bissonnette talking about how Sunday’s game against the Vegas Golden Knights was going to be a bad time for them. There still seems to be a sense of, “hey, they could maybe make the playoffs,” when it should probably be, “hey, what can this team potentially do when it does make the playoffs?”
This is not meant to be critical of those two guys for their predictions, or in Bissonnette’s case, getting a pre-game prediction badly wrong. Because we all do that. As Smooth Jimmy Apollo once said, when you are right 52 percent of the time, you are wrong 48 percent of the time.
It is meant to just point out that very few people outside of Pittsburgh have really paid much attention to what this team has actually played like and what it is doing. Honestly, I am not even fully convinced all of the city of Pittsburgh realizes how good this team has been so far.
It is almost as if everybody had an expectation in mind for what this team was supposed to look like this season and how it was supposed to play, and then nobody really took any time to pay attention to what they were actually doing or change their narrative.
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This is, admittedly, easy to do when you are working in a national setting and trying to focus on 32 different teams. Sometimes things slip through the cracks. I know first-hand how difficult that can be because I have spent the better part of the past 18 years trying to write and blog about teams and sports on a big-picture, national level. It is a lot to try and look at. I do not expect every person covering the sport of hockey to have an in-depth knowledge of every single player and storyline on every single team. Again, over 32 teams that is nearly impossible to do on the same level as a local beat writer. You are just getting a basic, big picture view before you move on to the next game.
The Penguins have also made it kind of easy on themselves over the past few years to go unnoticed. They have not won a playoff series since the 2017-18 season. They have not actually made the playoffs in three years. This is supposed to be a rebuilding season. No matter what big names and future Hall of Famers you still have on your roster, it is still a results oriented business. The Penguins have simply not produced much in the way of results over the past few years.
The other issue potentially at play: Nobody likes to admit they are wrong. Nobody wants to look like they are waffling or changing their opinion.
But you still need to be able to adapt and at least pay closer attention to what is actually happening.
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Do I know every detail of the Anaheim Ducks roster this season or what their third-defense pairing looks like on a nightly basis? No. I do not. Did I think they would miss the playoffs again before this season? Yeah, I did. But I do know they are currently a pretty good team, in a position to make the playoffs, perhaps in a position to win the Pacific Division, and I would not be treating them as the same bad, rebuilding team they have been the past few years. You would not be looking at them as sellers right now or questioning if they should trade, I don’t know, Troy Terry. Because they are now good. They have changed the narrative around their team and season.
The Penguins have done the same. It has just taken a long time for people to catch on to it because they have not done much over the past seven seasons and had very little in the way of expectations coming into the season. There is still a quarter of the season to play, and they still need to get Crosby back. They still have to keep collecting points and maintain this level of play. We will see if they can. In the meantime, they look the part of a really good team right now. Perhaps even a contender. They should probably be treated as such until they do something to show they are not.
