PITTSBURGH, PA - OCTOBER 24: Sidney Crosby #87 of the Pittsburgh Penguins skates during the game against the Nashville Predators at PPG PAINTS Arena on October 24, 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Joe Sargent/NHLI via Getty Images) | NHLI via Getty Images Adam Gretz · SB Nation Wed, November 4, 2026 at 4:46 PM UTC · 7 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Another night, another winnable game flushed down the toilet for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
They played a strong 5-on-5 game against one of the best teams in the league, but went 0-for-6 on the power play, failed to record a shot on goal on an extended 5-on-3 with three minutes to play in regulation, immediately took a penalty after, and then allowed Vegas to score its second power play goal of the game in the closing seconds to turn a 2-1 third period lead into a 3-2 regulation loss.
Honestly, a brutal night, and continues a start that has seen the Penguins win just two of their first 15 games in regulation (and only five games overall) and sit in 15th place (by points percentage) in the Eastern Conference and in 28th place across the NHL.
1. I said this a couple of weeks ago in a similar random thoughts post, but if you were on the train of the Penguins having a down year for draft pick positioning to get the potential future star they need, this might be your year.
We are more than a month into the season.
American Thanksgiving is just a couple of weeks away.
Teams that start off like the Penguins have do not typically make the playoffs. It is getting very late, very early in that regard.
When the season began there were a lot of variables that were going to make or break the Penguins outlook for the 2026-27 season. There was a reasonably high ceiling if a lot of things went right. There was a reasonably low floor if a lot of those things went in the opposite direction. Right now a lot of them are not going right.
2. High on that list is the play of defenseman Declan Carlile. It seems like every time something bad happens, he is at the center of it. That is especially true late in games, in high-leverage situations. The Penguins coaching staff seems to have complete trust in him, and there is not much at this point to validate that trust. I could see what the Penguins were doing with him when they signed him, and what the hope was. I had some hopes for it and thought he had a chance to be a good player. So far, it's going poorly and I'm not sure how you keep running him out there.
3. Next on the list is Andrei Kuzmenko, and this one is becoming an especially big problem because you do have other people that can easily step in and replace him.
Look, I want the guy to do well. For a lot of reasons. But right now, no matter what spot they put him in, it's an empty spot. They are not getting anything out of it. He has one assist and nine shots on goal in 11 games. Avery Hayes can bring some energy. Rutger McGroarty could use another look. Hell, even when Elmer Soderblom is healthy enough to play again he should be an option for something in the lineup.
4. If there is a positive development through all of this, and including Tuesday's game, it is that the first line seems to have found some life. The past two games from them have been, by far, their two best games of the season, and Sidney Crosby has looked more like Sidney Crosby. And now that they seem to be back, everything else has fallen off. Not ideal.
5. Going back to the first point here, I have been workshopping a theory that the best path forward for a rebuild (and I will still argue with anyone in a steel cage match that this IS a rebuild, even if it is not what you thought it would look like in terms of gutting everything down to the ground) is having a random bad year with a roster that isn't completely gutted. I still need to look into this more. I still need to research it more. But the theory is mostly based around the idea that a lot of this is just luck and good timing.
It's not enough to just intentionally get really bad for a year or two and get a No. 1 overall pick and a few more high picks around that and wait for Stanley Cups to roll in.
You have to get the RIGHT No. 1 overall pick, and it has to be in the right situation.
This is especially true with the new lottery format and the new lottery rules where the worst record could result in you picking as low as third overall.
Or not being quite bad enough to finish with the worst record to even guarantee that. Maybe you're only the second-or third-worst team in the league and end up picking fifth or sixth.
If you get your team down to the studs in the hopes landing that next franchise player, it has to be a true generational talent like a Crosby, an Ovechkin, or a McDavid.
Even a really good, or potentially "great" player (Connor Bedard? Rasmus Dahlin?) isn't going to be enough to make up for how far your organization has to come back. I think that's why you're seeing so many of these teams that have gone into these full-scale tanking rebuilds over the past 10-15 years that have never been able to claim out of it. Or are still so far away from climbing out of it. Chicago. San Jose. Detroit. These teams still mostly stink. Look at how long it took Buffalo. It's taken Ottawa eight years just to become a fringe wild-card team. Anaheim has great young forwards, but it's not close to a contender.
The closest player any of those teams have to a Crosby/Ovechkin/McDavid level player is Macklin Celebrini, and while he is GREAT, he is still a tier below those guys.
The key, I think, is having one of those bad years that isn't necessarily an "intentional" tank, getting yourself a top pick, and having that pick come into an environment where there are still NHL-caliber players around and there isn't as much building to be done.
That's kind of what happened with Colorado and when it landed Nathan MacKinnon.
That's kind of what happened with Carolina when it ended up with Andrei Svechnikov.
That's kind of what happened with Tampa Bay and Steven Stamkos.
Even though those teams ended up with really high picks and franchise players, they were not situations where it was a full-scale tear down. They were not coming into situations where it was going to take a decade to build it back up around them. Those teams still had really good NHL players on them, and were reasonably competitive teams within the previous two or three years.
That's kind of why I am intrigued by the Islanders with Matthew Schaefer and Toronto with Gavin McKenna. They got their superstars, but they didn't intentionally light their entire organization on fire to do it. It just kind of happened naturally, and there are still good players around them. They might not be contenders right now, but I want to see how the next few years go for them as opposed to, say, Chicago.
I know Penguins fans like to point to how the Penguins landed Mario Lemieux and Crosby, but those are NHL environments that no longer exist, and circumstances that can never be duplicated. The Crosby situation was an insane sequence of events that had a different lottery format than now, and required a completely lost season from the league to give them the lottery odds they needed … and it all happened around the best prospect since Lemieux entering the league. It was a perfect storm you will never, ever duplicate. You can not. You will not.
Lemieux happened before the draft lottery (and even then it took six years to pay off on a team level).
Teams that try to repeat aren't succeeding.
Maybe this Penguins team is bad. Maybe it gets a lottery puck. If it does, they are still going to have competent NHL players on the roster around it and a nearly clean salary cap slate in the coming seasons.
Maybe this team being organically bad is the best thing that could possibly happen.
Source: Sports
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