Another day, another forward injury for the Pittsburgh Penguins. This time it is rookie forward Ville Koivunen going on IR with a lower-body injury that will keep him out of the lineup on a week-to-week basis.<\/p>\n
Getting the call in his place will be 2019 first-round pick Sam Poulin.<\/p>\n
Now that he is 24 years old and shown no consistent play at the NHL level, Poulin has officially gone from a prospect to a suspect, and he might legitimately be looking at one of his last chances to carve out a career with the Penguins. In 13 NHL games he has zero goals and two assists, but he has been off to a very strong start with the Wilkes-Barre\/Scranton Penguins in the American Hockey League, scoring seven goals with eight assists (15 total points) in his first 16 games.<\/p>\n
He is currently the team\u2019s top scorer.<\/p>\n
Koivunen\u2019s injury is a bit of a disappointment and adds to the growing list of forward injuries that have no doubt played a big role in the team\u2019s recent slump.<\/p>\n
He joins an injured like that already includes forwards Rickard Rakell, Justin Brazeau and Noel Accairi, while Rutger McGroarty, one of the team\u2019s top prospects and best young players, begins a rehab assignment in the American Hockey League. That is a lot to take out of a lineup that did not have a ton of depth to begin with.<\/p>\n
Koivunen had just two assists in his first 11 NHL games this season, but I was not as down on his game as some others were. He just seemed like a guy that could not catch a break and just could not get a bounce on some prime chances. If one or two of them end up in the back of the net there is probably a different feel on his start. He was dominant in the AHL offensively before getting called back up to Pittsburgh. Now it will be a few weeks before he gets another chance.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, this really does feel like a big opportunity for Poulin. If he does not make much of an impact in this call-up it will be time to start asking if it is ever going to happen for him here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another day, another forward injury for the Pittsburgh Penguins. This time it is rookie forward Ville Koivunen going…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":387920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[529,293,76408,62,15777,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-387919","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-analysis","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-pittsburgh-penguins-prospects","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-statistics","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115571628741022527","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}