Letang playing like a 5th defenseman isn't helping with the injury/depth issues, either. I never thought I'd say I miss Matt Hunwick already, but...

Schultz's PP production is also sorely missed, particularly since the PP is about all (along with MM) that's keeping this team afloat at the moment.

Defense can at least blame injuries. ES scoring on offense? Not sure what's going on there, but I know it stinks. Sid and the Kids seem to be going the way of HBK this season.

the reddit Pens thread is a good place to read about Pens hockey. From there;

- Pens are -14 as a team on the year

- have lost games 10-1, 7-1 and 7-1

- but are still 7-5-1

We’ve been marginally good and REALLY fucking bad. Also some good opinions over there about Ryan Reaves and why he doesn’t make much sense on this team (an opinion of course).

My take: team defense and 5-5 hockey has been atrocious. Guentzel looked like a star last playoffs but is he a 30-40 goal scorer? I don’t know. This team goes as Crosby Malkin Letang Schultz and Kessel go.

Must play better, period.

Letang is -14 all by himself.

Yea I'm convinced they removed part of Letang's brain when they did the neck surgery. He wasn't the brightest guy in the world to begin with

Reaves has a place on this team, but it can't be part of a line that has Kuhn on it- that makes the line too slow. I get that Kuhn PK's but what else does he offer? If they put in Archibald for Kuhn (or Reaves occasionally) that at least solves some problems on the 4th line.

This team has played a ton of hockey and while I'm not thrilled with what's gone on, they've proven they can flip the switch come March

A lot of Letang's screw-ups in previous seasons (bad turnovers leading to odd-man rushes/goals, pinching at the wrong time leading to odd-man rushes/goals, insert multiple other brainfarts leading to odd-man rushes/goals as needed) have been covered by the fact that he's paired with the top two lines or on the PP most of the time, so the prolific scoring of those pairings hides his relatively shitty play in the +/- column. This year, top two lines' scoring hasn't been up to par, and Letang is getting exposed +/- because of it.

Another reason why +/- is a horrible stat for evaluating NHL play.

Scary stat? The Penguins lead the NHL with 19 sets of back to back games (38 of 82 total), where the NHL average is around 13. Whatever the back to back issue is, they'd better fix it. It isn't going away by itself.