Pittsburgh Penguins Confuse Everyone By Saying Entire Roster Is A 'Game-Time Decision'

It's not uncommon to see NHL teams get a little cagey when it comes to divulging details of their roster, but we got a new level of that from the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday night.

The Pens play the San Jose Sharks on Saturday evening, and before the game, the team shared some roster info on X that they said came straight from head coach Mike Sullivan.

The first piece of info was that defenseman Kris Letang would be out of the lineup with an illness. That's a shame and the Penguins could certainly use him on their blueline.

But it was the next tidbit that left everyone scratching their head: the team said that the remainder of the roster is a game-time decision.

Uh, excuse me? Everyone? 

I mean, I would've thought Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin would be shoo-ins provided they're healthy but I guess we'll see when the puck drops.

This obviously perplexed a lot of fans.

That last one echoed my biggest question: are they just going to make everyone on the roster throw on pads, take warmups, and then they'd make the line-up for the night?

I don't know how much you'd be able to gather from warmups that you couldn't have figured out from morning skate or watching film.

But that looks to have been what they did because they announced the lineup about 15 minutes before the scheduled puck drop.

That's just weird.

Things are not going well for the 6-10-3 Pens — and in all seriousness, the long-term outlook is even worse — and you know it's bad when they're doing this against the San Jose Sharks; one of the few teams in the league with a record worse than theirs.

The Penguins are probably going to get to the point where they'll have to make some tough decisions about what to do with their aging core of Crosby, Malkin, and Letang because this team is in desperate need of a rebuild.