PITTSBURGH — When the dust finally settled on the Penguins' 2021-22 season, after a frustrating batch of injuries contributed to another first-round loss and questions persisted about whether the core of the team would remain intact, assistant coach Todd Reirden popped open the hood of Pittsburgh's power play to take an extensive look.
What Reirden found was something of a mystery. Like most teams, the Penguins were helped plenty by the success of scoring on the power play, producing a 24-8-7 record when getting at least one man-advantage goal and going 22-17-4 when they did not.
But the diagnosis got complicated when Reirden essentially encountered a sound process ... but one that did not yield regular results, the Penguins going 0 for 25, 1 for 22 and 2 for 31 during various stretches of futility. A year after finishing fourth in the NHL with a conversion rate of 23.7% in 2020-21, the Penguins dropped to 19th at 20.2%.
