Consistently inconsistent best way to sum up Penguins at midway point of season

For the Pittsburgh Penguins, Friday’s home contest against the Winnipeg Jets will be their 41st game of the 2022-23 campaign, the midway point of an 82-game season.

Through Wednesday’s games, they sit in fifth place of the Metropolitan Division with a 21-13-6 record and 48 points.

Those figures tell where the Penguins stand in comparison to their peers, but they don’t tell the story of an outfit that has had a five-game and a seven-game winning streak as well as a seven-game and six-game losing streak.

On Thursday, after practice at PPG Paints Arena, seven established veterans and their coach were asked what the team has done well to this point of the season and what still needs improvement.

Sidney Crosby, center

“We’ve had obviously a good run there, December and November. That’s our game. We showed that consistently in that time frame. I think we’ve got to find a way to bring that more. Just consistency. We know our identity by this point. It’s a matter of just executing that a little bit more often.”

Brian Dumoulin, defenseman

“Our highs are high, and our lows are low. We’ve got to be a little bit more steady as a group. Maybe resilient. We’ve got to just be more even keel. We’re really high, and we’re really low.”

Marcus Pettersson, defenseman

“When we’re playing as a group, we’re really good. We’re on our toes. We defend to create scoring chances instead of chasing it. When we don’t, we look for opportunities and chase opportunities that maybe aren’t there and give the other team easy offense. We’ve had two stretches here where we’ve lost a few in a row. That’s something that we’ve got to look to clean up in the second half. If we start bleeding, we’ve got to find a way to stop it.”

Bryan Rust, right winger

“We do nothing perfectly. Nobody does anything perfectly. It’s tough because I think the biggest thing for us is consistency. You look at the times that we’re great and we go on runs and we play good games and our special teams are clicking and we’re all together, playing as a unit, doing little things. Then you go through runs where we don’t. For some reason, we don’t. That consistency right now I think is our downfall. If we can build on that and we can acknowledge that and we can start to gain more traction and have more consistency, I think that’s going to help our team have more success leading into the second half.”

Jason Zucker, left winger

“I think there’s a lot of stuff that we’ve done well. We have a lot that we can still kind of clean up. When we’re playing our best, our forecheck is one of the best. That’s just what we do really well. When we’re not doing that, we notice that we don’t play as well. We don’t dominate games, we don’t dominate possession of the puck. I would say that’s probably one of the most needed items of our game.

“We’ve had really good spurts of it. (During winning streaks), that’s what we were doing really well. The last few games, we’ve done it well. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the attention to detail for that in every single game.”

Rickard Rakell, right winger

“We’re all looking to get some consistency in our game. That’s our main goal going into the second half of the season. We all know the games are only going to get tighter and the standings are going to get tighter. Games are going to mean a lot more.”

Mike Sullivan, coach

“That’s not an easy question to answer. The area where we need to improve is just in our consistency of play. That’s probably an obvious response. We’ve had moments when we’ve been really competitive, we’ve won a lot of games. We’ve had stretches where we haven’t handled the ebbs and flows of the game. … I know we’re capable of being better. We’ve all got to work at that, and we are. We know what our game looks like when we’re at our best. We’ve got to try to bring that game more consistently.