Where are the Penguins after a quarter of the season?

The Pittsburgh Penguins had only 14 players on the ice for practice Wednesday in Cranberry.

It wasn’t an optional practice. Specific players — i.e. the ones who have played the most minutes recently — were told to stay off the ice for what was termed as a “recovery day,” a day after the Penguins suffered another clumsy defeat, a 3-2 come-from-ahead home loss in overtime to the Tampa Bay Lightning.

But even with limited numbers, there wasn’t much restraint on the intensity.

Defenseman Ryan Shea shoved his regular blue line partner, rookie Owen Pickering, to the ice somewhat violently during a puck battle drill on the boards.

And backup goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic broke his stick over the bench boards after giving up a goal during another segment of the session.

“Emotions were a little high,” Nedeljkovic said. “Just for me wanting to make every save. You just wanted to have a good day and bring some intensity to it. You don’t have to put anybody through the boards. Nobody is trying to kill anybody out there in practice. But sometimes you need that little bit of physicality. Just spark something. A little bit of a wake-up call. It’s also what makes it real and more legitimate and more game-like is when you have that physicality, you have that edge.

“Then it’s just going to come naturally in the game.”

What hasn’t been all that natural to the Penguins just past the quarter point of the 2024-25 campaign (25.6%, to be precise) is winning.

At least not enough.

At 7-10-4, they are in seventh place of the Metropolitan Division with 18 points. Only the woebegone Columbus Blue Jackets — who have played three fewer games with a 7-9-2 record and 16 points — are looking up at them in the division.

Few external projections suggested the Penguins would enter the season as a Stanley Cup contender, though there was reasonable hope of them being a threat to claim a playoff berth through a wild-card seeding.

There is still three-quarters of a season to be played. But they have failed to reach even the most modest of expectations through the first quarter.

“Obviously, not in the spot that we had hoped at this time,” Penguins forward Michael Bunting said. “There’s been good moments. There’s been bad moments. An up-and-down start. But we have a good group in here, and we have a group that we believe in ourselves. A group that likes to be together and we have fun together. Hopefully, we can turn this around. (Tuesday) night, we want to move past and learn from our mistakes.”

The most glaring mistakes have been in the form of goals. The Penguins have allowed far too many. Entering Wednesday, they had a league-worst goal differential of minus-26.

Tuesday’s result was only a one-goal defeat, but the Lightning scored the final three goals in the final 18 minutes, 57 seconds of play. That prompted something of an eruption by coach Mike Sullivan when asked about his team’s defensive prowess following the game.

“We have to compete harder,” Sullivan said. “We need more guys to compete harder and pay more attention to detail, and we need to take more pride in playing defense.”

On Wednesday, Sullivan expanded on what needs to be corrected defensively.

“There’s a level of accountability that we try to utilize to make sure that we’re holding people to a certain standard and a certain level of expectation,” he said. “It’s hard to have success in this league if you don’t keep it out of your net. We’ve got to defend harder. We’ve got to be harder to play against. I don’t think that’s any secret. That’s been the area of our game that has to improve if we’re going to get different results, more consistent results.

“At the end of the day, it boils down to a lot of things. It’s attention to detail. In some instances, it’s doing your job and trusting your linemates are going to do theirs. Then when the puck goes into the corner, it turns into a one-on-one puck battle, inevitably the game breaks down to a battle between me and you and who’s more willing to win the puck and who’s going to pay the price. Those are all the areas that go into being a team that’s hard to play against and being a team that’s stingy defensively. We’re capable of being that. We have shown that at times but not consistently enough.”

The Penguins next play the powerful Winnipeg Jets at home Friday. Boasting the NHL’s best record at 16-3-0 — equating to 32 points — the Jets, not coincidentally, also have the league’s top goal differential entering Wednesday at plus-34.

No matter the opponent, the Penguins still profess faith they can pull the nose up on this season.

“I just trust in the (people) we have, the guys that I’ve won with in the past and the guys that I’ve seen play the way they play,” defenseman Kris Letang said. “They have an edge to their game. It’s just consistency. That’s just the key. It doesn’t matter what kind of game plan, you have to execute it for 60 minutes. That’s the key.

“Every plan, if it’s executed for 60 minutes, will be successful in the long run.”

The Penguins have 61 games left to validate that postulate.

“We’ve shown we can do it,” Nedeljkovic said. “We’ve shown we can play really good hockey in spurts. So I don’t think there should be any reasonable doubt that we can right the ship here. We’ve got points in two games straight. (Four of the past six games). So it’s not all that bad.

“It doesn’t look great when you blow leads, obviously. And that’s something that’s frustrating. But you can also look at it like we’re there. We’re getting leads. We’ve got to find a way to either get the next one or keep playing on top of teams and not allowing them to get that momentum back, especially late in games. We’re right there. Just got to kind of get over that hump, whatever it is.”