Penguins Working To Help Jarry Capture His Best Game

Tristan Jarry returned to Pittsburgh during the team’s off day Wednesday to work with Penguins director of goaltending Jon Elkin.

“He's getting some individual time. It's just part of the process that we put in place here over the next little while to try to help Tristan get to his very best,” Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan.

Sullivan said this course of action had been planned from the start of the four-game Canadian road trip, where Jarry did not dress for the first two games against Winnipeg on Sunday and Calgary on Tuesday. Alex Nedeljkovic started both contests, while talented young rookie Joel Blomqvist served as the backup.

As detailed in this piece with insight from Kyle Dubas, with Nedeljkovic injured to start the year, Jarry got the nod for the season opener – a 6-0 loss to Toronto. Blomqvist made his NHL debut the next night in Detroit and played extremely well, earning the net for the next two games. After Jarry put together a decent outing in Montreal, he started the next game in Buffalo, and was pulled upon surrendering three goals on five shots.

As Sullivan put it, it’s stating the obvious to say Jarry’s first outings haven’t been his best. But the two-time NHL All-Star is a high-quality goaltender and a high-quality person who’s been an important part of the Penguins organization for several years now.

Not to mention there isn’t a significant body of work this early in the season, after a summer where Jarry worked hard in the offseason and reported to training camp in terrific shape. Sullivan said they feel strongly that will serve Jarry well as he digs in here.

“It’s our responsibility to help players through some of the struggles they inevitably go through in this league, and Tristan is no different,” Sullivan said. “It's our job as a coaching staff and a hockey operations group to try to do everything we can to help our players be at their very best. This is just a process that we've put in place. We spoke to Tristan about it. He's bought into it, and we'll go from there.”

As Jarry said before the team hit the road, re-discovering his game is obviously a work in progress.

“I want to be better,” Jarry said. “Those two, three games that I’ve had, I obviously was hoping for a better start, hoping to play better games. That’s on myself. I just have to keep working, keep managing what I’m doing and just work through it.”

Jarry said they did a lot of work on the mental side to start the season, “a lot of video, a lot of teaching. Now, it’s just at the point of letting go and being myself and trying to be the best goalie moving forward.”

OTHER PRACTICE NOTES:

While the coaching staff has tinkered with the forward lines on a few occasions, they flipped the top-two defensive pairings for the first time this season in the shootout loss to Calgary.

Marcus Pettersson skated with Kris Letang, while Matt Grzelcyk joined Erik Karlsson. Those duos remained together at Thursday’s practice in Edmonton ahead of their matchup with the Oilers on Friday.

“We're trying to find combinations that help bring us success, and I think we've had some inconsistency back there with our group,” Sullivan said. “When we have inconsistency, there's always that fine line as a coaching staff between patience and trying to affect some change. So, we felt it was time to try to affect some change. So, we'll see where it goes.”

Here's how the group up top looked:

O’Connor-Crosby-Rust

Bunting-Malkin-Rakell

Beauvillier-Eller-Glass

Hayes-Acciari-Puljujarvi

Graves and St. Ivany were the third defensive pair.