During the 2018-19 campaign, the Penguins’ aggressive play often led to offense.
It just happened to be the other team’s offense.
The Penguins were beleaguered by odd-man rushes by the opposition last season. That, in part, led to them yielding a league-high 15 shorthanded goals against.
Cutting down on the opposing odd-man rushes is a point of focus in training camp
“It’s more than a mindset,” coach Mike Sullivan said. “It involves attention to detail and hockey decisions. There’s a difference between systems (or) strategy and hockey decisions. It’s important to understand that. We’re not trying to play a high-risk game. We’re trying to play a calculated game. It allows for players to make hockey decisions. So we’re trying to empower guys because we believe in them and know they’re capable. A lot of it, really in my opinion, boils down to attention to detail. So we’re going to be sticklers for that attention to detail throughout the course of training camp.
“We have looked at how we’ve played in the past in areas where we think we can tweak our game in order to play to our strengths and we’re going to introduce some of those strategies and concepts throughout the course of training camp. But at the end of the day, a lot of it in that particular aspect of our game, boils down to hockey decisions and we’ve just got to make sure that we pay attention to detail and as long as we do that, I think we’ll be a good team.”
