After a discouraging loss to Anaheim on Monday night, their fifth setback in the past six games, the Penguins returned to the ice for practice on Tuesday in better spirits.
“I wouldn't say it's easy (to put that game behind us). You just have to,” Sidney Crosby said. “That’s the way it is. If we won seven in a row, it would be the same thing. We just got move by it.”
“Just get back to work. That's all you can do right now,” agreed Marcus Pettersson. “You can't change what happened. It was a tough one to take, for sure. We all feel that way. We’re in a slump right now. There's only one way out. It's less games right now, so we can get fresh and excited for the next one."
The Penguins have four full days between contests. They will get Wednesday off before skating on Thursday and flying to California that afternoon, practicing in San Jose on Friday and kicking off a three-game West Coast road trip against the Sharks on Saturday. Their approach for this period of time is to get some rest after a four-game homestand, while also trying to improve and get better in certain areas.
“Our coaching staff met this morning and put a game plan together for the next few days in what we're going to do and how we're going to go about it,” Head Coach Mike Sullivan said. “That's the process, right? That's the process that we go through. We're going to try to maximize every opportunity that we have to move the team forward. We can't change where we're at. All we can do is react the right way.”
The Penguins did not do line rushes or special teams work at today’s session. It centered around activity at the netfront and doing a better job at the blue paint trying to impede sight lines, and finding different ways to score goals offensively. Assistant coach Ty Hennes led the way in structuring some of those drills around friendly but intense competition.
“I think we're all just trying to stay positive,” Crosby said. “If we feel like our mindset or attitude is slipping, then I think it's something you have to address at that point. But I think we've had the right mindset... I don't see anyone feeling sorry for themselves. We keep coming back every game and putting pretty good efforts forward. So we just got to limit some mistakes, but I think we're continuing to work, and we just got to work through it.”
That being said, as Pettersson put it, at some point, they've got to start getting results.
“We got a good group in here. We know what we're capable of,” Pettersson said. “There’s character and there’s a lot of winners in here who have won a lot. It’s an experienced group. There’s only one way out. We got to really bury our heads. We got belief in each other, for sure.”
