I'm a big believer in conceptual planning, and by that I mean it's okay to come up with the concept

first and then see what you can do about it. Good morning to you. Good Thursday 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. 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. Penguins versus Canadians is tonight in Montreal.

That's a 708 p.m. face-off in Quebec.

And it'll represent the first full game for what looked like an intriguing, maybe, possibly forward line that added Drew O'Connor to Blake Lazott and Michael Bunting.

Now, when you hear the first name, DOC, the first thing you're going to think of is that he hasn't scored in like two months.

And when you hear the other two names, Lazot and Bunting, you're going to think, wow well, all these guys do score anymore. I mean, they just score like crazy. And what I think of is something else entirely,

because I continue to wait for the day that the Penguins, as an organization, can compensate

for their lack of fire or energy.

You can call it physicality, but it doesn't even have to be that.

You can just skate around and be full of fire and energy and be pesky and be, ready, hard to play against.

You can do all that without banging people through the glass. This team, of course, does very little of that. Now, it does more of that than it did last year,

and that's setting the bar really, really low because that team's bottom six was this close to comatose.

It was Lars Eller and five guys just basically eating up minutes.

So when you hear players, and I did the other night at PPG Paints Arena in covering that

nasty loss to the avalanche, complaining about

how there should have been more of this or more of that, what they're saying is that's the

kind of stuff that should be coming from your supporting cast. But it doesn't, at least not very

often. I used to even, this was last year, but come up

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