Penguins Notebook: Letang, Hayes Return to Practice, Team Focuses On Recovery

After a brutal 3-2 overtime loss to Tampa Bay on Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Penguins have two days to gather their thoughts before a tough back-to-back tilt against the Winnipeg Jets and the Utah Hockey Club on Friday and Saturday.

And it appears they’ll have one of their top defensemen back for those games.

Defenseman Kris Letang skated in a full capacity for the Penguins this morning, as did forward Kevin Hayes. While Hayes was not available for comment today, Letang said he is ready to help the team get back in the win column.

“You just want to be out there,” Letang said. “You just want to be out there and try to help this team win, and obviously, you can only watch and say what you think and what you see from on top, but I know these guys are battling hard. It’s frustrating that you play so many good minutes in a game, and there’s a couple let down, and you get on the wrong side of it, so that’s what we have to correct.”

Watching from afar, Letang believes that everything boils down to consistency for this team – both for individuals and for the squad as a collective.

“I think, it’s, for the most part, a problem of individual, and I think it’s translated into team performance,” Letang said. “[On Tuesday], I think we played two good periods, we let go one, and it’s enough to lose you the game. Vancouver, we played 55 good minutes, we let down five minutes. We have to be able to sustain 60 minutes of play and do it night in and night out, and we’re not doing that right now.”

The Penguins seemed to be steering the ship in the right direction after a statement win against the red-hot Washington Capitals on Nov. 8. Then, everything went downhill again.

They were dealt an embarrassing loss at the hands of the Dallas Stars on Nov. 11, followed by a disppointing but inspired 3-2 overtime loss to Detroit. They then dropped a bad loss to Columbus on Friday, and they blew a 3-0 lead against the San Jose Sharks on Saturday, despite getting the shootout win.

The Tampa Bay game was just the icing on the cake of a frustrating start to the season for Pittsburgh. The first 40 minutes looked much like the Washington game with the Penguins dictating the tempo and controlling possession against a good team, only to fold in the third period and lose a point they should have been able to grab.

“You’ve got to play the game a certain way every shift, and you’ve got to have a certain mindset every shift,” head coach Mike Sullivan said after Wednesday’s practice. “And  you can’t let momentum swings affect our ability to go out and play on our toes. I think that’s an important aspect of trying to get different results. We’ve been a team that has fallen victim to momentum swings, and we haven’t necessarily responded the right way to them.”

Maybe a bit of it is in the personnel on the ice, but a lot of it just comes down to a broken mentality. Letang believes that they have the personnel in the room to get the job done, and he thinks these guys are capable of turning a corner.

“I just trust the personnel we have, the guys that I’ve won with in the past, and guys that I’ve seen play,” Letang said. “The way they play, they have an edge to their game. And like I said, it’s just consistency. That’s just they key. It doesn’t matter what kind of game plan, you have to execute it for 60 minutes. That’s the key. Every plan that’s executed for 60 minutes will be successful in the long run.”

Some other notes from practice:

– Although there weren’t a whole lot of faces at practice on Wednesday, Sullivan stressed that it wasn’t optional. Everyone that was on the ice was there based on minutes and workload, and the guys who had a bigger workload were given a recovery day.

Since the Penguins have two consecutive days off in an otherwise busy schedule, they want to make sure they’re taking advantage of that.

“We’re playing three games in five nights,” Sullivan said. “We haven’t had too many opportunities where we have two days between games, so we’re trying to maximize that opportunity to recover.”

– Participants at practice included Hayes, Michael Bunting, Matt Nieto, Vasily Ponomarev, Sam Poulin, Jesse Puljujarvi, Valtteri Puustinen, Letang, Ryan Graves, Owen Pickering, Ryan Shea, Jack St. Ivany, Tristan Jarry (for half of practice), and Alex Nedeljkovic.

– Owen Pickering took a jab at teammate Cody Glass today when asked about hockey idols from Winnipeg growing up:

Pickering is a great interview, and he’s got a pretty good sense of humor. A piece about him growing up in Winnipeg during the NHL revival of the Jets’ franchise is in the works.