The Pittsburgh Penguins will have Bryan Rust back in the lineup Wednesday night after activating the veteran forward from injured reserve, the team announced.
Rust has been working his way back from an upper-body injury suffered in the club’s preseason finale against the Buffalo Sabres. He was initially described as week-to-week, yet he will return after missing only eleven days.
The timing is useful even if the offense has not been the problem. Pittsburgh has won two of its first three games, scoring fifteen goals and converting four of ten power-play chances.
Adding a proven middle-six scorer still deepens a group that has already produced early.
Rust, a twelve-year NHL veteran, has been one of the more reliable pieces of that group for the better part of seven seasons, and he is coming off one of his strongest years.
He finished last season with twenty-nine goals and sixty-five points in seventy-two games, an even rating, and an average of 19:57 of ice time. The year before was nearly identical in production: thirty-one goals and sixty-five points in seventy-one games, though with a minus-21 rating and 19:45 a night.
Because he is only just returning, Rust is not expected to jump straight back into the top six.
Morning line rushes placed him on the right wing beside Ville Koivunen and Benjamin Kindel for tonight’s Metropolitan Division game against the Washington Capitals.
That alignment gives the coaching staff a chance to manage his minutes while still putting a scorer next to two younger forwards.
The roster mechanics of the activation turned out simpler than expected. A corresponding move had looked necessary, but the Penguins earlier traded Filip Hällander to the Edmonton Oilers for Spencer Stastney.
The deal did not clear a roster spot on its own, yet it did open a place in the forward group for Rust.
Separately, the league has granted Andrei Kuzmenko non-roster status for the Capitals game.
Kuzmenko took a leave of absence in late September after the death of his father and has already appeared in two games since returning.
His absence from the active list for this contest removes one more variable as Pittsburgh brings Rust back into a lineup that has started the season with more scoring than the early injury news suggested it might have.
