Pens soar into All-Star break

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH

Dan Byslma isn’t a doctor, even though the Pittsburgh Penguins coach sometimes sounds like one while running down his team’s lengthy injured list.

So forgive Bylsma if he can’t exactly say whether star center Evgeni Malkin is fully recovered from the torn ACL in his right knee that prematurely ended Malkin’s 2010-11 season.

Malkin’s entertainingly broken English doesn’t lend itself to adjectives, anyway. Ask Malkin how he’s feeling and the Russian just smiles and gives some version of the word “good.”

All Bylsma knows is what he sees. And at the moment he sees the 25-year-old All-Star playing arguably the best hockey of his career, heady territory considering Malkin won the Conn Smythe Trophy while helping the Penguins to the 2009 Stanley Cup.

“I don’t know if he’s going to have another couple levels to get to 100 percent,” Bylsma said. “[If so] in six more months it’s going to be really scary.”

It already is.

Two weeks after Pittsburgh’s season seemed on the brink of unraveling in the midst of a six-game slide, the Penguins have turned things around in the blink of one of Malkin’s slapshots.

Pittsburgh enters the All-Star break riding a seven-game winning streak, the franchise’s longest since ripping off 12 straight in November-December 2010.

Yet that run came with the team nearly at full strength, before Sidney Crosby’s odyssey to recover from concussion-like symptoms began following a pair of hits last January, before Malkin’s season ended abruptly with knee issues.

This run has come with Crosby out indefinitely — again — as the symptoms returned in early December. It’s also come without forward Jordan Staal, likely out another month with a knee injury.

It has come mostly on the strength of the top line of Malkin, James Neal and Chris Kunitz, who have become nearly unstoppable over the last two weeks.

The trio has scored 16 of Pittsburgh’s 24 goals during the run, with Malkin’s nine over the span propelling him into the NHL’s points lead.

He’s scoring in a variety of ways. If he’s not rifling slapshots from his favorite spot in the right circle, then he’s weaving his way through traffic or posting up in front of the net to slam in loose rebound after loose rebound.