Shackles finally off Pens’ Schultz
Ex-Oiler piling up the points
When defenceman Justin Schultz was with the Edmonton Oilers, he was in hockey’s form of solitary confinement, trying to get through games with his skill set failing him.
While teammates liked him a lot, it was a lonely existence on the ice. The boos from the seats, the angry callers to the talk shows. The message was loud and clear; “Get this guy out of here.”
It wasn’t fair because Schultz was collateral damage with the Oilers not going anywhere year after year. He got caught up in it; he was hyped too high when the Oilers signed him as a college free agent.
Now that he’s with the Pittsburgh Penguins, he has a Stanley Cup ring, 45 points, he’s plus-28 and currently on the point on the No. 1 power play because Kris Letang is hurt. Life is good. He’s smiling again, but former teammate Matt Hendricks says he wasn’t given too much too soon. It was all the losing.
“By no means did the organization throw him into the lion’s den and expect him to fail,” said Hendricks. “You have to look at injuries, transactions, how veterans are playing — maybe not as well as they needed to. So he gets more minutes because of that as well.
“It was an accumulation of a lot of things. The forwards weren’t good enough, the defencemen weren’t good enough, the goaltending wasn’t good enough. Nobody was having career years here.”
When the Oilers pardoned Schultz in February 2016, deal- ing him to the Penguins for a third-round pick in the 2016 draft, it was like Schultz had seen daylight for the first time in eons. His confidence, in tatters here, is back to where it was when the Oilers first signed him in 2012
“I obviously didn’t play well at all when I was here. Especially near the end. I needed a change in environment,” said Schultz.
“I remember near the end here being pretty down. When you don’t have confidence at all, you’re afraid of making a mistake every time you have the puck. That’s what it was like near the end.”
The Penguins had to build Schultz up when they got him. Playing with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin helps, as does playing on a team with Cup aspirations.
“When we acquired Justin, we knew we were getting a guy with really good offensive instincts and we thought he could fit into the style we want to play,” said Penguins coach Mike Sullivan. “He sees the ice well, passes the puck extremely well. He’s a mobile guy and that’s the type of defence corps we’re trying to build.
“We tried to put him into situations when we first acquired him where he could play to his strengths. For the most part, he didn’t play against the topsix forwards of our opponents. We tried to use him in offensive situations and play him behind players like Crosby or Malkin in certain situations where his skill set would help them and they’d help him. I give Justin so much credit for the overall development of his game."