Every concern and flaw was on display in Penguins season opener

This all looked very familiar for the Pittsburgh Penguins.

If you had some lingering optimism about the 2024-25 Pittsburgh Penguins, their season-opening 6-0 loss to the New York Rangers was probably quite a punch to the face on Wednesday evening.

Look, it is one game.

It is one game out of 82 games.

It is also just the first game.

You do not want to jump to any irrational conclusions or overreact to one result, especially on a night where the Western Conference champion Edmonton Oilers lost by the exact same score (to a worse team, I might add).

But it is not necessarily the loss or the score that is so disappointing about the result.

You are going to lose games, and you are going to play games that are absolute stinkers. It happens.

The problem is the way the Penguins lost, the way they looked, and the way that every single concern that you could possibly have for this team was on full display from start to finish. Even worse than that, there were some issues that might not have been concerns that also showed up.

Basically everything the Penguins have done wrong or struggled with over the past four or five years, they did on Wednesday night.

All of the questions and “ifs” that you might have had? They all had negative answers.

Questionable goaltending? Oh, buddy, did Tristan Jarry lay an egg in this game right from the very start. You knew it had to be a bad omen for the game when the very first Rangers shot on goal found the back of the net. When Alexis Lafrenfiere scored to make it 2-0, on an innocent looking shot that probably should have been a routine save, you knew it was not going to be your night. It was not an encouraging start for the one player on the roster that is probably facing the most pressure to perform.

Defensive zone breakdowns? Oh, those were everywhere and resulted in numerous Rangers odd-man rushes. Every Penguins player was on the ice for at least one-goal against, while every player outside of Rickard Rakell was on the ice for a 5-on-5 goal against. It was an equal opportunity failure across the board.

A shorthanded goal against? Of course that was there, helping the power play to pick up where it left off a year ago.

Ryan Graves looking lost and getting caved in when he is on the ice? That happened all night, as he finished with a 33 percent shot attempt share and was on the ice for two goals against.

What was perhaps most concerning for me is that the Penguins did not even control the pace of the game or have any sort of territorial advantage. Even a year ago you could at least point to their 5-on-5 play as an encouraging sign because they were, at times, able to out-chance their opponents. You could squint and say to yourself, “well, if they could just fix the power play and get a few saves their 5-on-5 play is still pretty good!”

On Wednesday, the Rangers took a sledgehammer to them across the board.

They were crisper, smoother, faster, more skilled, better defensively, had better goaltending and just looked one or two levels above the Penguins.

Now, to be fair, the Rangers are an excellent team. They are a Stanley Cup contender and have a lot of high-end skill. The Penguins are not going to play teams quite that good every night, and certainly not teams that play that flawlessly. But it was still alarming to see just how far ahead of the Penguins the Rangers were.

The Rangers looked like a team on a mission that was playing a meaningful game.

The Penguins looked like a team going through the motions in a preseason game.

The scoreboard ended up reflecting that.

That does not mean things can not change. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin will still have big games. There are a lot of new faces on the roster still adjusting to each other and a new system.

But again ... everything just looked the same as we have seen for a few years now. Only a little worse. There is time to fix that. There are big picture reasons to think it can get better. It was just an awful showing to open the season.

It is just not encouraging in any way because until this team does something to change the narrative around them, the narrative is going to remain the exact same as it has been. Wednesday did nothing to ease those concerns. Whether it is just one game or not.