Spent a lot of time on this program going over X's and O's little things that could have gone this way or that way on the ice.

Strategic choices, personnel choices, player level choices. I'm going to take a

break from that today. Good morning to you. Good Thursday morning. I'm Dan Kovachvich of D.K.

Pittsburgh Sports, and this is Daily Shot of Penguins. It comes your way bright and early every

weekday. If you're into football and or baseball, I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Pirates in the same place that you found this. I just got back from Detroit and spending a couple of days up there with the hockey team. I wasn't as put off by the four to two loss to the Red Wings a couple of nights ago as some might have been,

mostly because I saw the way the penguins were playing, the way they were pushing as being a very real continuation of what I felt that they'd started in earnest

Sunday in beating the Islanders here in Pittsburgh.

And if anything, I was actually in an odd kind of way encouraged that they could make that event repeatable because that's actually what has to happen

to get this team into the Stanley Cup playoffs again.

They have to have a foundation where they can do something like Sunday again or at least come close to Sunday again.

And outside of the first few minutes, and the Red Wings came out, all fired up, big crowd,

new head coach, New Year's Eve, and they had the early juice, as Sullivan likes to call it.

But for 50 minutes after that, and they all agreed to this, I mean to a man from Sullivan to the

captain to everybody, they were really good.

Didn't get all the breaks, didn't have much of a power play in a third period, and the Red Wings

then followed up by converting on their own power play, but they were really good.

Now, all of that is hockey stuff for the most part.

What I'm here to share with you today, and I was thinking about this a lot on the four-hour drive back,

man, this is a good group. And I'm not sure I really

appreciated that the way I should have before this week. There's a healthy vibe to the player

composition, the mix of personalities, the way they interact, and maybe more than anything else,

the positivity, they don't get bogged down or beat themselves up over results. And you can, in some

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