Totally mood point now, but just imagine, imagine if this team had either contended or come close to contention, then wonder, which I'm going to do today out loud, how that might have affected the trajectory

where this team's headed. Good morning to you. Good Friday 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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The Penguins take on the blue jackets tonight at PPG Paints Arena.

That's a 708 p.m. face off.

That looked like, even just a few days ago, it was going to be something significant or maybe a little bit significant.

And it's now not anything of the kind.

But seeing how things have gone of late, and this really encompasses the last, whatever,

it's been three or four weeks that the teams played better hockey,

but especially since Tristan Jari returned and has been mostly excellent.

Not just, like, really good and has been mostly excellent. Not just like really good.

He's been excellent with precious few exceptions.

It's from there that I look at the standings and the wild card gap this morning and say,

I mean two or three additional wins early on in the season,

whenever everything was just imploding, notably the goaltending, but not limited to the

goaltending, arguably beginning with the goaltending.

And I think to myself that if the Penguins had just gotten league average goaltending,

if Jari and Alex Adelkovich and then once he came up,

Yol L. Blomquist were to have ranked as a group 15th or 16th in the league,

not asking a whole lot.

What would that have done for a team that

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