During the Penguins pounding of the Blues Sunday afternoon, a very subtle facet of one player’s time on ice (TOI) came to my attention while watching the final period of the game and simultaneously keeping an eye on the box score. Jake Guentzel, normally lauded for his goal-scoring presence on the ice, was only recorded having one even-strength shift for 50 seconds throughout the entire third frame. That’s right: one.
Pair this with the fact that he skated for just over nine minutes, a less than almost double difference from his usual 15 or 16-some TOI minutes, and it got me wondering if Mike Sullivan has been unhappy with the way Guentzel’s played as of late, specifically in that St.