ATLANTA -- You know the Atlanta Thrashers, right?

The team that had two winning records in its first nine seasons.

The club that has qualified for the playoffs once and hung around only as long as it took to be swept by the New York Rangers in 2007.

Yeah, those Thrashers.

Well, actually, they are not those Thrashers anymore. Not at all.

The Thrashers who will face the Penguins tonight at Philips Arena own the second-most prolific offense in the NHL, generating an average of 3.61 goals per game.

They have the league's third-best power play, with a conversion rate of 25.3 percent and its sixth-ranked penalty-killing unit, with a success rate of 83.6 percent.

And, even though they are allowing a league-high average of 35.2 shots per game, that has not translated to a bloated-goals against average. Atlanta is yielding a middle-of-the-road average of 2.89 per game.

All of which explains why, after spending most of their existence as one of the league's bottom-feeders, the Thrashers are 10-6-2 and looking very much like a club capable of qualifying for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

"It's a little different," Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury said. "We're used to seeing them, maybe, at the bottom of the standings."

The Thrashers' cornerstone talent continues to be left winger Ilya Kovalchuk, one of the game's most lethal goal-scorers. He might not be quite be the goal-scoring equal of Washington's Alex Ovechkin, but, if he is not, Kovalchuk is not far from it.

"Both of them have awesome shots, really hard," Fleury said. "They're two guys with great hands, tough to beat."

Fact is, with 13 goals in 12 games, Kovalchuk was the only NHL player averaging better than a goal per game before last night.

Kovalchuk, though, no longer has to try to make the Thrashers competitive almost single-handedly.

Not when Ondrej Pavelec and Johan Hedberg have been giving Atlanta consistently strong goaltending, which is critical to any team's success.

"Pavelec is going pretty good, and Hedberg is winning some big games for them," said Penguins forward Pascal Dupuis, a former Thrasher.

Atlanta also has some excellent young talent in guys like Zach Bogosian and Evander Kane, but it might be the addition of free-agent forwards such as Maxim Afinogenov and Nik Antropov -- along with the pick up of Rich Peverley off waivers from Nashville last season -- that has done the most to propel the Thrashers onto the sunny side of .500.

Peverley leads the Thrashers with 23 points, while Afinogenov has scored eight goals and Antropov has set up 16.

The biggest surprise might be Afinogenov, who earned a reputation as an underachiever while playing in Buffalo and had to accept a tryout offer from the Thrashers this fall to keep his NHL career alive.

Suffice to say, he would not have trouble finding interested teams if he were to go back on the open market now.

"Afinogenov is playing really well for them," Dupuis said.

The Thrashers are 4-0-1 in their past five games and, unless they stumble, figure to gain more attention as the season moves along. For now, however, their progress seems to have gone almost unnoticed in much of North America.

That has been true even in their home city. Three of Atlanta's past five games at Philips have attracted crowds in the 11,000 range.

"They play in a tough market, a tough hockey market," Dupuis said.

If the Thrashers continue to be entertaining and successful, though, more fans might begin to show up. And, at this point, there is no reason to think Atlanta should not be able to stay competitive for an extended period.

"If you have goaltending and you have speed and everybody believes in each other, you can win," Dupuis said. "And that's what they're doing right now."

Penguins Plus, a blog by Dave Molinari and Shelly Anderson, is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.