Oct 24, 2015 4 min read

Jaromir Jagr is on pace to score 60 goals this season.

At least he was coming into this weekend. He’s 44 years old and scored five goals in his first seven games for the Florida Panthers.

That should to tell you that it’s early in the NHL season.

The Penguins went into their game Saturday night at Nashville with a 3-4 record, with the fourth loss being a 4-1 stinker to the Stars Thursday night on home ice.

Lots of conclusions seemed to be being made about the Penguins after seven games. That’s about 1/12th of the season.

It would be like drawing conclusions about a Steelers team after the first quarter of Game 2.

There are already rumblings about coach Mike Johnston’s job status. It might be a good idea to give him a chance to try to develop some chemistry with a team that has so many new players.

And it’s really not fair to Johnston to be judging his work as though this season is a continuation of the disappointing one last year.

The 2014-15 season was all about injuries.

No coach could have been expected to overcome them.

What is fair is to judge him on what he’s able to do with the team he has now. It has three of the best point producers on the planet and they’re not producing points.

The Penguins scored two power play goals in their first seven games.

There’s very little if anything that a coach can do about injuries, but the Penguins’ problems in their first seven games are all about coaching.

That’s not to say that it’s all the coaches’ fault. But figuring out how to make the best use of talent, who should play with whom, whom should be where on the power play, whom should dress and whom should be scratched are all about coaching.

So is getting the players to believe in your decisions about all of the above.

Johnston has no excuses.

He and his staff need to find answers and make the right judgments to make the 2015-16 Penguins a Stanley Cup contender. But he needs to be given a reasonable amount of time.

• Rick Pitino won’t be attending ACC media day next week in Charlotte, N.C. And it’s not because he doesn’t want to have to answer questions about the scandal surrounding his Louisville basketball program.

It’s because he doesn’t want to have the questions about an escort/stripper, who says she was hired by a former Louisville assistant basketball coach to provide girls to “entertain” high school kids interested in matriculating at his fine university.

The assistant, Andre McGee, resigned Friday as assistant coach at Missouri-Kansas City because he could no longer do the job, as he fights “false” allegations that he arranged 22 shows with Katrina Powell and other dancers -including her three daughters – that, according to Powell in her new book “Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen” included stripping and having sex with the recruits.

The Louisville police and the NCAA are investigating.

Pitino says he’s shocked and had no idea that something this horrible could have gone one.

Feel free to believe Pitino if you’d like.

I don’t.

Major college football and basketball is a cesspool. There’s no better example than in the state where the ACC is having its media day.

The University of North Carolina had “student-” athletes who were taking courses with no classes. The academic advisor reported that most football and basketball players had no business on a college campus because of fourth-to-eight-grade reading proficiency. Some “students” couldn’t read at all.

She was demoted and removed to a basement office.

The coach during the time when basketball players were taking phony courses and getting phony grades was Dean Smith, who was one of the most revered figures in college sports until the day he died.

Sorry, I believe the escort.

If the president of the University of Louisville had any interest in preserving the integrity of his institution, Pitino would have been fired by now for allowing it to happen on his watch.

• I’m too tired to look it up, but I’d be willing to bet that you can’t find one baseball expert who predicted the New York Mets to be in the World Series.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.