Why Ex-Oilers Skinner Is Clicking with the Penguins
Sometimes a player changes teams, and you can feel it almost right away. Not in a loud way. Not with headlines or hype. Just in how quickly things settle down around him. That’s been the case with Stuart Skinner in Pittsburgh.
It didn’t take Skinner long to be appreciated in Pittsburgh.
It didn’t take long for Penguins fans to warm to him, and it didn’t take long for the room to do the same. You hear it in the way teammates talk about him. He’s not a saviour, nor a reclamation project. He’s just a guy who fits. That matters more than people think, especially for a goaltender.
Part of it is timing. Skinner arrived in Pittsburgh without the weight he carried in Edmonton. There, everything came attached to expectation: Cup runs, short windows, loud postmortems. In Pittsburgh, he arrived as an answer to a problem, not as a referendum on the franchise. The bar was simpler: give us stability. So far, he has.
Skinner isn’t bitter about anything that happened in Edmonton.
Another part of it is Skinner himself. He doesn’t sound bitter about Edmonton. He doesn’t sound defensive. His comments about fairness — or not caring whether things were fair — landed exactly the way Pittsburgh fans tend to appreciate. It reads as professionalism, not resentment. Do your job. Try to win. Go home. That tone plays well in a city that’s seen enough drama to recognize when someone isn’t interested in adding to it.
Then there’s the quiet confidence. Skinner isn’t flashy, but he’s calm. His numbers since arriving aren’t eye-popping, but they’re solid, and more importantly, predictable. A 2.34 goals-against and a .902 save percentage won’t dominate talk shows, but they settle benches. Teams play differently when they trust what’s behind them, and Pittsburgh looks like a group that trusts its goalie.
Skinner isn’t the hero goalie who has to carry the team night after night.
What also helps is that Skinner isn’t being asked to carry the story. He’s not the headline every night. Some nights he starts, some nights he doesn’t, and the team still moves forward. That’s a luxury he didn’t always have in Edmonton. In Pittsburgh, he’s allowed to just be part of the team.
The irony, of course, is hard to miss. It wouldn’t be shocking if Skinner ends up going on a longer, calmer run here than he ever did with the Oilers. Not because he suddenly changed — but because the environment finally did.
That’s often how goaltending works. Same goalie. Different noise level. Different results. And in Pittsburgh, Skinner sounds like exactly the kind of goalie people are happy to believe in.