Another season. Another choke from the Pittsburgh Penguins. While they are nowhere near the level of the San Jose Sharks and Washington Capitals in terms of choking, Sidney Crosby and the Penguins are building quite a resume. Here is a look at the highs and lows of the 2013-14 season for Pittsburgh.

Highs

As is usual, the Penguins were one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference. Pittsburgh won seven of its first eight games. After a 9-5-1 November, the team pulled off an impressive 11-3-0 record in December including a seven-game winning streak from Dec. 9 through 21. The team continued to play well all the way until March when the club started to lose some steam.

Sidney Crosby led the league in points with 36 goals and 104 points. What was even more important was that he was healthy for the entire year. He played in 80 games, which was the highest amount of games played by the superstar since 2009-10 when he put up 51 goals and 109 points.

Another high for the Penguins was the performance of Marc-Andre Fleury. The netminder was heavily criticized after imploding in last season's playoffs, but the team gave him another shot in 2013-14 and he responded with a solid .915 save percentage. Fleury of course is usually solid during the regular season and the question was always about how he would respond in the playoffs. Since winning the Stanley Cup back in 2008-09 (when he posted a .908 save percentage), Fleury had not been able to stop at least 90 percent of the shots he faced in a playoff run. This season he looked shaky initially, but bounced back and wound up with a .916 save percentage through 16 games; that was his best percentage since the 2007-08 postseason when he stopped a terrific 93.3 percent of the shots he faced.

Lows

The team's season went about as well as one might hope. Pittsburgh did slow down in the final months with a 2-1-2 record in February, an 8-7-1 record in March and a 3-2-2 record in April. But no one cares about the regular season with this team. When you have two of the greatest players in the World, only the Stanley Cup matters. But this team was far from a solid playoff performer. After a suspect performance in the first round against the Columbus Blue Jackets, the team took a 3-1 series lead against the New York Rangers and proceeded to blow the lead in embarrassing fashion. The Penguins only scored three goals in the final three games of the series in the seven-game elimination.

Team MVP

Sidney Crosby was the team's top performer throughout the year with 104 points but Evgeni Malkin was the team's most consistent star. "Geno," as he is often called, was just as impressive offensively throughout the regular season with 72 points in just 60 games; he would have probably picked up around 95 points at that rate if he had played the full 82 game season. But his performance in the regular season was not his only contribution. Malkin was Pittsburgh's best playoff performer and it was not even close. He led the Penguins in scoring throughout the postseason with 14 points in 13 games including six goals. He scored a hat trick in the deciding game against Columbus and scored seven points in the series against the Rangers.

Elimination Scapegoat

When you are a team captain and called the greatest player in the world, you are expected to rise to the occasion and be the hero no matter what. That was the responsibility of Sidney Crosby and he failed... epically. Crosby had the worst playoff performance of his career with only nine points in 13 games. But the kicker is that he only scored ONE goal in 13 playoff games. To put that into perspective, Crosby scored three goals in six playoff games back in 2011-12 and put up three goals in his first ever postseason experience back in 2006-07 when his team was eliminated in five games in the first round. Here is another statistic: Crosby had averaged at least a point-per-game in every playoff run prior to this one. But the embarrassment did not end there. He only scored three points against and was shutout for five of the games. He was continually pushed to the outside by the Rangers' defense. Every single time he tried to make a move into the middle of the ice, he was met by two or three Rangers. He had no space and it was clear that he simply did not know how to overcome New York's suffocating defense. More was expected of Crosby and he simply did not show up.

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