(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

Come playoff time, no one likes to miss games. Which is why you see so many guys playing a level below their normal capabilities.

Anyone who watched Saturday's 4-2 Rangers’ win over Pittsburgh likely noted the return to the lineup of Evgeni Malkin, out since March 11 with an, ahem, “upper body” injury. And watching him play, you had to think to yourself, “Maybe he should have stayed out of the lineup.”

Medically, that seems like a correct diagnosis. He was injured early in a game on March 11, and was supposed to miss six to eight weeks. Given that Saturday was April 16, it's fair to say that “not even five weeks” does not equal six-to-eight. You could tell he was playing ahead of schedule, because he didn't look anything like the Malkin fans know and opponents dread.

This has nothing to do with the absurd “But the Penguins went 17-2 without him” argument, and everything to do with the fact that he flat-out looked pretty bad, save for a few flashes of brilliance, in his return. He played the second-most minutes at 5-on-5 of all Penguins but in a game in which they out-attempted New York 59-50 in all situations and 43-37 at 5-on-5, they were 9-13 when Malkin was on the ice. That is to say, going 32-24 when he's off is a dominant number (57.1 percent). The kind of number one might expect when, say, a healthy Malkin is on the ice.

But he was awful and probably not playing at anything close to 100 percent. Let's put it this way: If you give Malkin 12 minutes of 5-on-5 TOI, you expect him to attempt at least a single shot and not get pinned in his own zone more often than not. It's a minor miracle that he wasn't on the ice for a goal against, because Pittsburgh conceded eight scoring chances of various quality during that time.

Now, you can argue that part of the problem was that Mike Sullivan was playing Malkin on the wing for a good chunk of the game, which is obviously not his natural position. After the game, he told reporters his preference is to play in the middle of the ice, but it was probably judicious for Sullivan to limit the exposure he was getting, especially because he was regularly taking a shift with Crosby against the Nash-Brassard-Miller line. Not exactly soft competition. Malkin did indeed end up with a marginal shooting advantage when playing alongside Crosby, but given how bad he looked you can guess he also got run over when occasionally away from the world's top player.

When criticizing Malkin, you have to also note that he ended up with a point in his return. Fair enough. But that was a secondary assist on a 5-on-3 goal, and more to the point Malkin still looked like he was very much out of sorts even on the man advantage. Sullivan deployed him liberally here, giving him more power play TOI than anyone on the team except workhorse Kris Letang, and nonetheless he attempted a single shot. As you can probably guess, it did not end up on net, despite the fact that he was in a high-danger area. That kind of thing happens even to players running at 100 percent but again, just looking at him, you could tell something was off.

Given the secrecy with which NHL teams conduct themselves even for out-of-conference home games in November, one can assume that we won't know until the Penguins are eliminated (or win the Cup, I guess) what's ailing Malkin, or how much he rushed his comeback. You give away that kind of info and you're asking for Malkin to absorb more (and more-targeted) than just the three checks for which various Rangers were credited on Saturday — and buddy, it felt like a lot more than three.

Point being, you have to wonder if Malkin playing at, let's say, 60 or even 75 percent (if we're being extremely generous) is actually beneficial to the Penguins. Especially if you're going to insist on throwing him back into the deep end — playing mostly with Crosby, and mostly against top competition — and hope for the best. No one is saying Oskar Sundqvist, who drew in for Game 1 in Malkin's absence, is moving the needle in any appreciable way for the Penguins, but he's making Sullivan bump everyone he's using up a spot, instead of shuffling everyone down one to make room for Malkin. Fast being a minus-1 possession player in minutes against the third or fourth line is probably a lot less damaging than Malkin being minus-4 against the top one.