It’s never easy for an NHL team when one of its best players goes down. The Pittsburgh Penguins have dealt with this for much of the 2025-26 season, with Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, and Erik Karlsson all missing time.
Despite that adversity, they have continued to climb the standings and bank the points needed for a legitimate playoff push.
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However, it’s an entirely different animal when your best player is set to miss some time. And that’s exactly what the Penguins are facing.
On Wednesday, it was revealed that captain Sidney Crosby will miss the next four weeks with a lower-body injury that he sustained during the 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano-Cortina. While the nature of Crosby’s injury wasn’t specified, the timeline was, putting the Penguins in a difficult spot.
Right now, they sit eight points back of the division-leading Carolina Hurricanes with a game in hand and three games against them in March. They have a guantlet of a March schedule that includes 17 games in 31 days, and 14 of those games are against teams currently in playoff position.
They have played teams above them in the standings pretty well this season, but it won’t be quite as easy without Sid. The players know this, but they are ready for the challenges that come with it.
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“Anytime anybody goes out of the lineup, I think everybody’s kind of got to ramp up their game a little bit,” Bryan Rust said. “Guys are going to have opportunities to play in positions that, otherwise, they may not have been able to play in. Obviously, yeah, he might be a little bit harder to replace than others, but I think that just means the rest of us have to step up that much more.”
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He added: “Once you get the official word, I think it’s kind of like a moment where we all have got to think about ourselves and be like, ‘Okay, let’s pick it up here, there’s a lot of hockey over this next little while. We’ve got to win as many games and get as many points as possible.”
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As Rust said, there are several guys who will be playing different roles without Crosby in the fold, and that’s especially true down the middle. The Penguins did recall winger Avery Hayes – who had six goals and seven points in his last five AHL games, including two hat tricks, since he made his NHL debut and scored two in a 5-2 win over the Buffalo Sabres on Feb. 5 – to help offset some of the scoring lost from Crosby’s exit.
But Rickard Rakell will begin as the team’s first-line center, which is a role he hasn’t played much in a long time at the NHL level until sporadic deployments there this season. Tommy Novak will continue to center Egor Chinakhov and Evgeni Malkin, and Ben Kindel will resume his third-line center duties for now.
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All that said, they are aware they will have to play a bigger role, and that includes the 18-year-old Kindel, who has six goals and seven points in his last six games and is already used to the prospect of being elevated to a bigger role within an NHL lineup.
“I think, just collectively as a group, everybody’s going to have to step up a little bit and chip in just a little bit more,” Kindel said. “But, I’m ready for any extra that I need to do to help the team win, and I’ll always be ready for that no matter what the situation is.
“None of us are pleased to see our leader, our captain, and our best player go out like that. But, at the end of the day, there’s nothing we can do about it now, and we’re just going to have to step up, play as a team, and try and bank some points here down an important stretch.”
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Kindel believes this team is capable of carrying on and pushing for the playoffs without Crosby in the fold, especially since they have dealt with those other major injuries for sustained periods of time this season and still managed to keep winning hockey games.
And that resilience, he said, speaks to culture in the locker room that begins with 87 but trickles down to the rest of the group as a collective.
“There has been major pieces of our group that have been out at different times during the year, and I think we’ve just stuck to it no matter what that situation was,” Kindel said. “And I think that’s just a testament to the culture of our team and just the group that we have in here.
“On any given night, anybody can step up, and it’s been great for our team this year.”
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