Penguins’ Bryan Rust out at least six weeks with lower-body injury
Bryan Rust’s poor injury luck continues, as Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Dan Muse announced on Thursday that the winger will be out for at least six weeks with a lower-body injury.
The six-week timeline is less a certainty that he will return at the end of it, just that the team will re-evaluate the injury and go from there. This timeline will keep Rust out of the lineup until at least the beginning of December, and will miss at least 15-20 games of the regular season for the Penguins.
Rust has been placed on injured reserve as a result of the injury, along with Ben Kindel, who had been hospitalized after collapsing on the team plane.
Rust sustained the injury during Monday’s 5-4 loss to the Utah Mammoth. He left during the second period of the game after colliding hard into the boards. While he did get up and return to the bench under his own strength, he was limping in the process.
The injury came in just Rust’s seventh game of the season, as he had missed the first three due to an upper-body injury. This injury will guarantee that Rust has missed at least 10 games in five of his last six seasons.
However, when Rust was healthy, he was producing at his usual rate with three goals and two assists for five points in those seven games, a 60-point pace in a healthy season.
With Rust out, Tommy Novak will take his place on the top line alongside Sidney Crosby and Rickard Rakell. The trio has yet to play together this season, but have spent 11:34 together since Novak’s arrival to Pittsburgh at the 2025 Trade Deadline, where they were outscored 1-0 and had a 38.22% 5v5 expected goal share, according to Natural Stat Trick.
Between Rust’s injury and Kindel’s hospitalization, two new players have entered the lineup in Hendrix Lapierre and Elmer Soderblom. Rutger McGroarty and Chase Pietila were also recalled from the Penguins’ AHL affiliate, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, to replace Kindel and Rust on the roster.
The Penguins currently sit in seventh in the Metropolitan Division with a 3-6-1 record. They’ll look to snap a stretch of seven losses in eight games when they host the Florida Panthers on Thursday at 7 p.m. ET.
