"There is, players will tell you, no bad time for a break in the NHL schedule.

Not if a team has lost four or five or six games in a row, certainly. And not even when it has won seven consecutive games, as the Penguins did before the NHL shut down for the better part of a week.

The schedule is simply too demanding, the games too grueling, to complain about any chance to recuperate and rejuvenate, they say.

And so the Penguins -- whose current winning streak is their longest since they ran off 12 in a row Nov. 17-Dec. 11, 2010 -- enter their game tonight against Toronto at Consol Energy Center with no misgivings about being idle since a 3-2 shootout victory last Tuesday in St. Louis."