Penguins Update: What’s Happened to Drew O’Connor (and Can He Be Fixed)?

As our Penguins cruise into the holiday break on the hockey equivalent of Santa’s sleigh (a 9-3-1 hot streak), I decided to take a gander at our individual production. I was scanning our scoring list on Hockey Reference when a name brought me to a screeching halt.

Drew O’Connor.

It wasn’t all that long ago (the summer of 2023 to be exact) that I posted an article comparing O’Connor to another rangy forward, Buffalo’s Tage Thompson. Before you shout me down or label me a fool or worse, there was some validity to my comparison.

A first-round pick of the Blues (26th overall in ’16), Thompson didn’t blossom into a super-scorer right away. On the contrary, over his first 145 big-league games,…