It won’t make or break their regular season. It could very well end up having no impact on the Metropolitan Division standings whatsoever.
But Thursday night’s Penguins game in New York feels like it has some added importance.
“Huge game,” bluntly said Pittsburgh forward Bryan Rust following the Penguins’ 6-4 loss to Colorado Tuesday.
The Penguins currently sit in third place in the Metro, with 92 points. New York is second, with 96 points and Carolina leads the way with 98. Washington is behind Pittsburgh by just six points.
Those four teams, in all likelihood, will be the four representatives from the division when the NHL playoffs begin in four weeks. The order in which the finish is still very much to be determined.
For the Penguins, an end-of-season surge would mean a reversal of direction. Pittsburgh has lost five of seven, including a 5-1 loss in New York and a 3-2 home loss to the Rangers just four days later.
“For us, obviously that last one at (Madison Square Garden), we’d all like to forget about it,” Rust said. “It’s all going to be in the back of our minds that we need to play better than that.”
“It’s a big game,” veteran forward Jeff Carter added. “We obviously weren’t pleased with the two previous against them, just with our team game and the way both of them went. I think we’ll be ready to go, and look for better effort and a better result.”
It’s not as if the Penguins have played poorly, exactly. Five of the team’s last eight losses have come by just one goal, and Pittsburgh has gone through a gauntlet against some of the league’s top teams, including a pair with Colorado and a road win over Minnesota in the last week.
“I think we still have some work to do,” Carter said. “These last three games in particular, the last two didn’t go our way, but I think our game has really come along. Playing the Colorados and Minnesotas, that are top teams in the league, it’s made us elevate our game and I think we started getting to another level.”
The Rangers are similar in many ways to the Penguins. New York is deep in offensive skill, and quick. A younger group, the Rangers’ speed has given Pittsburgh fits in the last two meetings. New York also has one of the top goaltenders in the league in Igor Shesterkin.
“We didn’t do a whole lot of good things against them the last two games,” said Carter. “Our total team game needs to come up. Our compete on pucks.
“They’re an aggressive team, they work hard and they’re fast… Just making smart plays, the right reads and not taking too many risks, that’s a big part of it.”
Carter’s coach, Mike Sullivan, echoed those statements Wednesday following practice.
“We’ve got to try to dictate the terms regardless of who we’re playing or what that particular style of play is.
“(We need) responsible play with the puck. Managing the puck the right way, forcing them to play goal line to goal line, staying on the right side of the puck and the right side of people. Making sure we change smart, so we don’t give them any easy looks.”
With the NHL’s playoff structure, the Penguins are Rangers could very well be bound for at least four more battles when the postseason gets underway. And, at the moment, New York has to feel that it would have the upper hand in a playoff series with Pittsburgh.
“There’s a decent chance that we’re going to see a lot of them in the future,” Rust said. “We’ve got to come out and establish ourselves and show them who we are.”