With the Pittsburgh Penguins’ playoff hopes seemingly changing by the day for the past few weeks, Sidney Crosby surely has been monitoring the league scoreboard like someone who has binge-watched Netflix after borrowing their cousin’s password, right?
“No.”
OK, but he has to be keeping tabs on the standings every day.
“No.”
As his team prepares to face the Detroit Red Wings at PPG Paints Arena on Thursday in their latest “must win” to keep their playoff hopes intact, Crosby’s focus is where it needs to be.
His team.
“When I come to the rink, (the playoff race is) on everywhere,” Crosby said Wednesday after practice at PPG Paints Arena. “So it’s hard to miss it. But I haven’t been scoreboard-watching for the last couple of weeks. It doesn’t change what we have to do.
“Our outlook has been pretty clear for a while now.”
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Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact game where the Penguins’ ongoing surge to postseason relevancy began.
A 5-4 overtime road loss to the Colorado Avalanche on March 24 could be cited as the genesis of this surge. Goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic made his first of nine consecutive starts in that contest, and that still-active streak has allowed the Penguins to claim points in all nine contests.
And there could be a case the Penguins’ last game against the Red Wings, a 6-3 home triumph March 17, kicked things off.
Regardless of the point of origin, this journey will have only one acceptable terminus.
The playoffs.
“The fact that we’ve battled back to get to this point, nobody wants to let it slip away now that we’re this close,” Penguins forward Drew O’Connor said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done. It’s even more motivating for us now to win these last few (now) that we’ve gotten ourselves back in it after looking like we were out of it.”
The Penguins (36-30-12) and Red Wings (38-32-8) are in almost the same predicament entering Thursday’s meeting. Each team has 84 points, one fewer than the current occupant of the second and final wild-card position in the Eastern Conference, the Washington Capitals (37-30-11, 85 points).
But, based on the league’s second tiebreaker — regulation wins — the Penguins (31 regulation wins) are in third place, and the Red Wings (27 regulation wins) are in fourth place.
Either way, Thursday’s game commands quite a bit of gravity.
“We have four more (games),” O’Connor said. “The next one in front of us is, obviously, huge against Detroit. We’ll get ready for that one.”
The Penguins seemingly have been ready for the past handful of weeks. Since Nedeljkovic took over as the team’s undeclared starter, the Penguins are 6-0-3 and have earned 15 points, a figure that equates to a points percentage of .833.
Only the Central Division-leading Dallas Stars — the last team to beat the Penguins in regulation, on March 22 — have a better point percentage over that span (.875 with a 7-1-0 record and 14 points).
“They’ve all felt pretty big for a while now,” Crosby said. “This one (is), obviously, even bigger given the circumstances. But I feel like we’ve been playing in games like this for a bit.
“I feel like, for the last two or three weeks here, we’ve been right in it. It’s brought out the best in us. We’re playing good hockey. We believe in our game, and we’ve just got to continue to do the same thing.”
