The October schedule has turned out to be a brutal one for the Pittsburgh Penguins, full of some big tests against some of the NHL’s best teams.
So far, they are struggling with that test.
It is not going to get any easier at the start of this week.
The Penguins enter Monday’s game at the Utah Mammoth on a three-game losing skid, currently 0-for-3 on their four-game road trip, and have lost six of their past seven games since a 2-0 start.
Nothing is going well.
The power play? An absolute mess that is
struggling to do anything right.
The penalty kill? Starting to become a little leaky.
The defense? Struggling to cleanly exit their own zone, handling the puck like it’s a tennis ball and leaving people all alone for scoring chances.
The goaltending? Not up to the early challenge.
Combine all of that with games against teams like the Colorado Avalanche and Vegas Golden Knights, and you have some ugly results and losses starting to pile up.
Unfortunately for the Penguins, it is not going to get much easier this week. That includes Monday’s game against a Utah team that is starting to emerge as an early season contender in the Western Conference.
The Mammoth enter Monday’s game with a 6-3-0 record, and boast one of the league’s best offenses early in the season. They are sixth in the NHL in goals per game (3.67), already have four players averaging at least a point per game (Clayton Keller, Mikhail Sergachev, Nick Schmaltz and Dylan Guenther) and have a power play unit that is clicking at a whopping 35.3 percent, the highest mark in the NHL through the first three weeks.
Not exactly a great opponent for a team that is struggling to defend right now.
If there is a silver lining in that matchup, it’s that Utah’s goaltending has been sub-par through the first nine games, while their penalty kill is working at only a 73.9 percent success rate.
Maybe this is a chance for the Penguins power play to break out of its slump, or for the offense to score more than two goals, which has kind of become their number over most of the past seven games. The Penguins also just need to salvage something from this road trip.
Whether they do or not, their return home is going to put them up against yet another contender when the Florida Panthers make their way into Pittsburgh on Thursday night.
Even though they missed the playoffs a year ago, the Panthers still entered the 2026-27 season as one of the top betting favorites to win the Stanley Cup, and that was largely due to the return of top center Aleksander Barkov and the addition of winger Brady Tkachuk.
Well, Barkov is sidelined again (but not for the entire season this time) and will not be available on Thursday. Or for several more weeks.
But that has not really slowed down the Panthers offense.
They enter the week on a three-game winning streak and have scored at least seven goals in two of those games. Even more eye-opening: They have four hat tricks over that stretch, including a natural hat trick in three consecutive games (two from Brady Tkachuk, one from Carter Verhaeghe; Sam Benntt had the fourth hat trick in that stretch, though it was not a natural hat trick).
Not only do the Panthers have plenty of depth, they are also one of the most physical teams in the league with a lineup that thrives on creating chaos.
The Penguins do get a little bit of a scheduling break here as they will be home, and rested for a couple of days, while Florida plays the night before in Ottawa.
This week’s schedule concludes on Saturday with a home game against the Nashville Predators. Nashville is a team in a similar boat as the Penguins, trying to orchestrate a version of a rebuild with a roster that still has a lot of veteran pieces on it. On paper, this is the most winnable game of three on this week’s schedule.
Even more than getting wins (which they need), I really just want to see the Penguins start to figure some things out this week.
The top line is starting to show some signs of life. That’s … something.
But they need Rickard Rakell to find the net. They need the power play to look like a functioning unit. They need the defense to stop stepping on a collection of rakes in their own zone. I basically just want to see a better, more consistent process, especially against good teams. Show you can at least hang with them, or at least avoid the five-to-ten minute meltdowns that seem to happen every game that put them out of reach. There have been some stretches of good hockey this season. They have carried games for significant stretches, and outplayed teams for significant stretches, only to have everything get completely undone by a handful of mistakes that unravel everything and always seem to end up in the back of their net.
It is game 10 of the season. There are 74 games remaining after Monday. There is still time to fix things. But you have to start making some progress on that. Start showing a better, more consistent process and let the results take care of themselves after that. That’s the thing I want to see this week. Just play better. Play more consistently. Even if it doesn’t translate into immediate wins yet, just show you are capable of it for more than short stretches.
