Penguins seeking improvement in faceoffs
Toward the late stages of practice in Cranberry on Sunday, four members of the Penguins roster met at center ice with head coach Mike Sullivan and assistant coach Mark Recchi.
The four players who congregated with Sullivan and Recchi were Teddy Blueger, Evgeni Malkin, Jared McCann and Dominik Simon, each currently serving as one of the team’s four primary faceoff men.
With Sullivan, a former center during his playing career, acting as a linesman and dropping pucks, the four forwards worked on taking faceoffs.
Faceoffs are a point of focus late in practice today: pic.twitter.com/fE1XvuNg9J
— Seth Rorabaugh (@SethRorabaugh) November 24, 2019
With Sidney Crosby absent from the lineup because of a core muscle injury, the team has struggled in faceoffs having won only 44.4% of its draws in the six games he has missed.
“Obviously, he’s on the ice a lot,” Blueger said of Crosby. “It’s tough. Everyone has got to kind of chip in. I don’t know if we try to replace necessarily the number of faceoffs. As a group, everyone’s stepping up their game and playing a bigger role without him in the lineup.”
“It’s an area where we think we have to get better at and we’re capable of getting better at it,” Sullivan said. “So we’re trying to help as best we can with the strategies that they’re trying to utilize in the faceoff circle.”
In addition to Crosby, Nick Bjugstad, the team’s only regular right-handed draw, is also sidelined with a core muscle injury. Due in part to their absences, the team has tried to incorporate tactics employed by their peers.
“We’re looking at other faceoff men in the league and our video (staffers) have pulled some of the strategies of some of the guys that are really good at it and try to better understand it so we can help these guys improve in that aspect of the game,” Sullivan said. “It’s one of the subtleties of the game but in my mind, anything that happens 60 to 75 times in a game is important. We believe as a group of center icemen, it’s an area where we think we can get better.”
Seth Rorabaugh is a TribLive reporter covering the Pittsburgh Penguins. A North Huntingdon native, he joined the Trib in 2019 and has covered the Penguins since 2007. He can be reached at srorabaugh@triblive.com.
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