Not so long ago, the New York Islanders looked to be little more than a punch line, the kind of opponent every team dreams of scheduling for homecoming.
Just last season, they were anchored at the bottom of the NHL's overall standings.
Now they are acting like playoff contenders.
They entered last night's game with a four-game winning streak and an overall record of 22-19-8, good for eighth place in the Eastern Conference.
There's no guarantee the Islanders will hold on to a playoff berth, of course, but no good reason to believe that they can't, either.
"They've brought some young guys in and given them a lot of experience, especially last year," Penguins center Sidney Crosby said. "They're hard workers and they're skilled. You combine that, and you're going to get results."
New York went 1-4-5 in its first 10 games but has rebounded and is playing with the kind of consistency missing from its game in 2008-09.
"Last year, you didn't know what you were going to get, whether it would be a team that would throw 45 shots on goal or a team that was going to struggle to get 20," Penguins winger Mike Rupp said.
"This year, they've done a great job of putting it all together. They're that team that you have to watch out for, putting up a lot of shots and creating offense. They have a lot of skilled players, and they're playing pretty well."
The Penguins' third line, which has Jordan Staal between Matt Cooke and Tyler Kennedy, doesn't possess the offensive volatility of the units centered by Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, but in a lot of ways it set the standard for the team's forward combinations.
"I would say they're probably the best line, positionally and structurally, and [for] being in the right spots for each other, which leads to getting more pucks in the offensive zone and then keeping them there," coach Dan Bylsma said.
"They've been very good at cycling and moving their feet and maintaining possession, reading off each other. They consistently get shifts that last 30, 40 seconds in the offensive zone. That's what they bring to our team. When that line's doing that, it can grind other teams down."
Bylsma's decision to start Brent Johnson against the Islanders was a bit of a surprise, partly because Johnson hadn't had much practice after suffering an injury that forced him to sit out five games, and partly because giving John Curry a chance to rebound from a sub-par performance Saturday in Vancouver seemed like a good idea.
Johnson, though, said an MRI of his injury -- the nature of which hasn't been disclosed -- Monday had removed fears that he might be coming back prematurely.
"I don't foresee it getting any worse," he said. "It's been like this for a while. I can take something to make the pain diminish a little bit."
After practice Monday, Johnson had suggested he might like to get in a few more workouts before playing but said yesterday that was mostly a matter of stamina, not sharpness, and that the game-day skate eased any stamina concerns he had.
Johnson's usual partner, Marc-Andre Fleury, is out with a broken ring finger on his left hand.
A lot of teams break the season into 10- or 20-game segments. The Penguins don't stop there.
Bylsma said yesterday that his team is not locked into a rigid breakdown, tailoring its segments to the nature of its schedule.
"We take a different approach in different parts of the season," he said. "We're in the third [block of] 20 games, but we took a five-game approach when we went out on the trip [that ended Saturday in Vancouver] and we know we have 12 games left before the [Olympic] break. It's a big chunk of the season, it's an important chunk of the season."
First Published: January 20, 2010, 10:00 a.m.
