Two years ago, Olli Maatta’s season ended with a sun-soaked nap on an apartment balcony after the Pittsburgh Penguins celebrated a second straight Stanley Cup with a parade down Grant Street.
On Thursday morning, as the Penguins cleaned out their lockers in Cranberry, his season-ending mood was decidedly more somber.
Maatta missed the last three games of a first-round sweep by the New York Islanders as a healthy scratch.
“Obviously you want to be playing,” Maatta said. “It’s not easy.”
This offseason, the Penguins need to alleviate a salary-cap pinch and will likely want to change up their personnel to try to retool for another run at a championship. Both factors point toward Maatta possibly being moved in a summer trade.
“You don’t try to think of that,” Maatta said. “I guess all you can do is just go and have a good summer and what happens happens.”
Maatta said he won’t need surgery to repair a shoulder injury that kept him sidelined from Feb. 11 to March 29.
“I felt I played pretty well at the end of the regular season,” Maatta said. “Obviously didn’t have a good game in Game 1.”
