Five days ago, the Pittsburgh Penguins were riding high with a five-game winning streak. Now, they’ve lost three games in a row and will be without their best defenseman for the foreseeable future.
The team placed Kris Letang on Injured Reserve (IR) on Monday morning; Letang left Saturday night’s loss in Detroit after just two minutes of ice-time, in which he scored a goal. The injury came exactly one month after his last injury, which was also a lower-body injury.
In a following move, the Penguins recalled winger Jake Guentzel and defenseman Chad Ruhwedel from the Wilkes-Barre/ Scranton Penguins. Guentzel has 42 points in 31 AHL games, with three goals and an assist in five games at the NHL level. Ruhwedel has 16 points in 28 games in the AHL, and has a goal and assist in five NHL games.
According to Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, these were the lines when the Penguins skated on Monday morning:
Sheary-Crosby-Rust
Guentzel-Malkin-Hornqvist
Hagelin-Bonino-Kessel
Kunitz-Cullen-WilsonMaatta-Daley
Cole-Schultz
Warsofsky-Ruhwedel-Oleksy
Cap Friendly reports that the Long-Term Injury Reserve (LTIR) savings from Pascal Dupuis and Brian Dumoulin are enough for the Penguins to make the recalls, meaning Letang won’t be out long enough to warrant being placed on LTIR.
Letang has only played a full season once, back in 2010-11. Since then, he’s played just 293 of a possible 452 regular season games. Despite his injury history, Letang has 246 points in those 293 games.
Replacing Letang’s offense will fall to the rest of the Penguins’ defense core; most notably Justin Schultz will need to continue his renaissance season. Schultz has 26 points in 42 games this season, which represents the best offensive pace of his NHL career after several poor years which got him traded out of Edmonton.
I’ve always been and still am a huge Kris Letang fan. However he’s becoming like Beau Bennett, always hurt.