It has been a whirlwind year for Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman Jack St. Ivany.
Last May, he signed a three-year extension with Pittsburgh worth $775,000 annually at the NHL level. He made the NHL club out of training camp, and - after struggling through the first month of the season - he was optioned to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton (WBS) on Dec. 3 to find his game again.
And just four days after his re-assignment, he went down with an injury that kept him out of the lineup for almost two months. It took him a while to get back to 100 percent, both physically and mentally.
Now? St. Ivany is fully healthy and ready to capitalize on the opportunity in front of him and the rest of the squad in WBS. In 32 games with WBS this season, he has a goal and 11 points and is a plus-4, and he has spent a lot of time on the top pairing with Sebastian Aho.
"Injury was unfortunate, and it took a little time to get back," St. Ivany said. "The first, maybe, five or six games after not playing, it was a little bit of finding myself. And then, I feel like I started to string together a lot of games, and I'm having a really good time here."
St. Ivany spent 19 games at the NHL level to start the season, registering just one point. But it wasn't the production that failed to mirror what the Penguins' coaching staff saw in the 6-foot-4, 205-pound blueliner last season.
A lot of the shortcomings in St. Ivany's game in the earlygoing this season were in the defensive details that he seemed to handle with a high degree of confidence and execution in 2023-24 to pair with his physicality and skating ability.
Unfortunately, his slow start to the season was a bit of a blow to that confidence, and the coaching staff saw an opportunity to allow him to try and find that again at the AHL level. So they made the difficult decision to option him.
"When I got sent down, it was just a little bit about confidence," St. Ivany said. "I feel like my game kind of dipped a little bit. The conversations with [the coaching staff] were just that it's hard as a younger player to re-find that in their experience. And they found that going down to the AHL and playing a lot more minutes is when you can start to develop. So, for me, it's just about keeping it simple, defending hard, using my feet, and then, it's just building confidence."
St. Ivany admitted that the initial disappointment of being sent down did affect him a bit, especially given his ...
