Ben Kindel sat at his locker after Monday’s practice, next to Sidney Crosby’s empty stall. As the rookie forward responded to the question, he looked up at Crosby’s name plate — as if Crosby’s presence was there even if he wasn’t.
“Sid’s quite a big part of our team. Our leader. The guy that we look to in the big moments,” Kindel said. “Like we’ve done all year, when guys have been out, we’ve stepped up as a group and kind of filled that void. It’s not been easy, but we have a lot of character in this room.”
To this point, the amount of time that Crosby could miss with his lower-body injury suffered in the Olympics has not been made public. Penguins players who were present in the locker room after practice Monday seemed prepared to play for an uncertain stretch without No. 87.
“There are a lot of games and not a lot of days. Who knows how long Sid will be out?” linemate Bryan Rust said. “But this first stretch out of this break will be big because you can grab some momentum. There isn’t a lot of time to right the ship if things aren’t going well.”
Crosby’s injury comes at a tricky time for Penguins general manager Kyle Dubas. There are only five games remaining between now and the NHL trade deadline March 6.
Whatever decisions Dubas makes about who to target at the deadline, who to retain or who to deal could be impacted by how the next five contests go.
The Penguins begin the post-Olympic break with 70 points, five better than fourth-place Columbus and Washington in the Metropolitan Division. The second wild-card team has 69. That’s Boston out of the Atlantic Division.
For his part, Rust understands the importance of these five games and what they could tell the GM, with or without Crosby in the lineup.
“We’ve been given very low expectations on the outside. But on the inside, our expectations have been high,” Rust said. “For us, any time we can continue to prove to the outside world, to ourselves, to management, to everybody that we deserve the utmost respect and an opportunity to win, I think being able to win and play good hockey without one of the best players in the world — of all time — will definitely go a long way.”
With the East being so tightly packed, the likelihood of the Penguins playing themselves completely into a playoff hole between now and March 6 is slim. Furthermore, none of their opponents between now and then have more points than they do. Two of them — New Jersey (58 points) and the New York Rangers (50 points) — are the bottom two teams in the Eastern Conference.
“It’s a guy you can’t replace. But it’s also an opportunity for other guys to step up and bring a little extra every night,” forward Rickard Rakell said. “We know what we have to do to keep this thing going. It’s going to come down to a full team game. Coming to play every night — a playoff mentality before every game.”
Holding second place in the division with 26 games left, the prospect of a major sell-off from Dubas is unlikely, even if the Pens stumble out of the break. Given how this team has overachieved to this point, that’d lose the room. In particular, that’d sour Crosby upon his return.
Whenever that may be.
But such a circumstance would also probably dilute any interest Dubas would have in fishing to acquire help for the rest of the year, especially if Crosby’s diagnosis projects him being out multiple weeks beyond the deadline.
That said, if a hockey trade becomes available to Dubas that he likes, he should make it, regardless of the ebbs and flows around a possible Crosby’s absence the next two weeks.
As we’ve outlined previously in this space, a trade for Dallas’ Jason Robertson, for instance, wouldn’t just be a move for this year. He’d be an addition now, and, presumably, come with an extension in place to be here in the future.
Talk of his acquisition has cooled significantly since it began to bubble a month ago. But if not Robertson specifically, a player or two of that contractual status are the targets Dubas should be hunting. Players at or nearing RFA qualification who are young and have some upside that would require picks and recent draftees (like the 12 the Penguins selected besides Kindel last June).
As with all things involving the 2025-26 Penguins, nothing is happening within the vacuum of this season. Every personnel decision is part of the swirl of trying to build for the future while angling to help the club quickly in Crosby’s waning years. The recent acquisition of Egor Chinakhov is the best and most recent example of trying to walk that fine line.
This five-game stretch of playing without Crosby is no different for Dubas, and shouldn’t be treated with any additional gravitas, unless management is withholding some information about the extent of the captain’s injury status.
Dubas knows this. But it would help if the current players nudged him in the right direction by getting off to a hot start in the immediate post-Olympic reboot.