Sidney Crosby Besides the goaltenders, who are often the first ones on the ice for practice, the first Pittsburgh Penguins skater glided out a few minutes before the others Friday at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, bag of pucks in his hand. And then Sidney Crosby, team captain and future Hall of Famer, began cruising at a crisp pace around the rink, stickhandling but not shooting as his teammates trickled out.
Maybe he was digging in a little extra deep after a bit of a tough game the night before in a 4-3 overtime loss to Utah? Or just had some extra jump in his legs?
“I like to go out early and work on things. That hasn’t changed,” Crosby said, dispatching any conspiracy theories or preconceived notion.
Crosby, who ranks fourth on the team with seven points, including three goals, in 13 games, did acknowledge that, just has the Penguins in total, he is looking for a little more consistency. “I’m working at it,” Crosby said.
“I’d love to have a better start, but the only thing you can do is try to learn and get better, keep working at it. That’s the best way to get out of it.
He had no points and was a minus-2 against the Mammoth. “I think you evaluate each game and try to improve certain things based on the game itself and what you feel out there, what you see.
I think game-to-game that’s always different. Definitely a lot of things I can work on.” Perhaps in the name of the team-wide search for consistency — coach Dan Muse again brought up that mantra on Friday — the Penguins kept the same lines and pairings at a brisk practice held before the team flies to Montreal for a game Saturday.
Before practice, injured forward Elmer Soderblom worked out on the ice. The lines and pairings: Tommy Novak-Sidney Crosby-Rickard Rakell Egor Chinakhov-Ben Kindel-Evgeni Malkin Andrei Kuzmanko-Hendrix Lapierre-Ville Koivunen Connor Dewar-Blake Lizotte-Nick Robertson Spencer Stastney-Erik Karlsson Sam Girard-Kaedan Korczak Declan Carlile-Kris Letang
