found myself falling into a bit of a bad habit here for the past couple of weeks on this program

and i'm aiming hard to break that habit beginning today good morning morning to you. Good Tuesday morning.

I'm Dan Kovachievich of D.K. Pittsburgh Sports.

This is Daily Shot of Penguins.

It comes your way bright and early every weekday.

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in the same place that you found this.

The Stanley Cup playoffs are going to be the goal for the 2025-26 NHL season,

meaning for the local franchise.

Meaning, not an oversell here. I'm not suggesting anybody's going to be

contending, meaning not an undersell either because the notion that this team is somehow

not just heading toward being a lottery level roster, but even trying to be a lottery level roster is so preposterous

that I can't believe that it legitimately seems to be the prevailing opinion, meaning that

they weren't all that far away from the playoffs the last time we saw them.

Hear me out. Hear me out. I realize I'm swimming upstream here on this one. Okay? I get that. I get that perception is a very difficult thing to combat. And the perception that the penguins were entering this particular off-season ready to sell off for parts

has yet to be hit hard enough in the face with the reality that they did no such thing.

If anything, the handful of moves that they made, none of them being really all

that significant, made the team a little bit better, little bit better than it was at the end of

last season. So pressing pause right there, if you've got anything to say to me about this specific stance,

I don't want to hear a blessed syllable until you can tell me where the penguins got worse

since the end of last season.

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