More Penguins Armchair GMing

This is a great time of year for hockey fans. If your team was the one team that just won Lord Stanley’s Cup you are out reveling in your team’s victory. If your team was one of the 30 other also rans, there is optimism that with the right off-season moves your team can now position itself for that Cup win; talks and rumors abound.

Unfortunately, next July, once again, only one team and their fans will be celebrating. The rest will once again be spinning their wheels in vain anticipation.

Luck can sometimes factor into a team’s improvement, but a team can make its own luck by taking a cold, hard, critical look at itself, divorcing itself of ego and preconceived notions. The best and first place to start is to ask where did the team fail? And that is what has me worried. With all the chatter and rumors, one could easily think no one was paying close attention. Granted, under Ron Hextall, there is little substantive items popping up, mainly talking heads trying to sell advertising space, but everything so far points to writers and possibly even Hextall grasping at low hanging fruit, rather than an objective analysis of the team’s 3rd consecutive 1st round exit.

Look at all the names being tossed around as trade targets; first it was Zack Kassian, later The Hockey Writers suggested Matthew Tkachuk, more recently after Bill Guerin’s Minnesota Wild buyouts, Zach Parise. Even our own Rick Buker wrote about the idea of trying to get Ryan Reaves back. Now, I just read a quick headline suggesting that our Pittsburgh Penguins have serious interest in Zach Hyman.

What do all these players have in common?

No, not all of them are named Zach or a variation there of.

They are all forwards.

Stop it already!!! Our Favorite Flightless Fowl where not dumped out of the playoffs because they did not have the fire power to establish a lead! They had leads in both Game 5 and Game 6 for goodness sake, but they could not defend those leads.

If you want and can find a way to get Hyman, Tkachuk, Parise, and or for that matter, Connor McDavid, Leon Drasaitl, Auston Matthews, and Nikita Kucherov, in the words of Rocky Balboa “Go for it!” but first go out and fix the teams defense. A team can score all the Goals (G) it wants, and it won’t matter if the other team scores more.

The bottom line to the Black and Gold’s early tee-times centered on 3 defensive gaffes. Kris Letang pinching with a 1 G lead in game 5, leaving a forward, Jake Guentzel to play defense. In Double Overtime (2 OT) of the same game, Cody Ceci pinching all the way down to the goal leaving a hobbled left-handed Evgeni Malkin to cover his right point. And then Letang, again, this time with the lead in game 6, gambling and trying to keep the play alive and pinching down the wall, leaving the Captain Sidney Crosby to try and race back and cover for the ersatz defenseman.

The New York Islanders did not overwhelm our Boys of Winter with offense. When Hextall went out and stole Jeff Carter from the Los Angeles Kings, the center depth arguably put our hometown heroes in the top 5 in the league in forward depth. No to the contrary, the Islanders beat our Penguins by being far more disciplined defensively.

I do not care if you want to blame Letang and Ceci or if you want to blame their Coaches, Mike Sullivan and Todd Reirden. I will listen to your arguments. In fact, I will help you argue either point. However, Hextall start here fixing the defense.

And no Mike, while I agree that forwards do need to take their own portion of responsibility in team defense, inherent to the term defenseman is defense first. Neither Letang nor Ceci had any business jumping up on those plays and losing that series for the team. If the team was losing and the defense jumped up then I would agree with you, the forwards needed to support their defensemen. But that was not the case here.

Defensemen
As far as the team’s defensive players are concerned, for all I care, dump them all and start from scratch.

Marcus Pettersson is way overpaid for what he has brought for the last 2 seasons. He was given his raise far too early in his career.

Cody Ceci was adequate that is all. You do not re-sign him for much more than what he was already getting.

Mike Matheson played better than I anticipated but Ceci played better and far cheaper. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that Ceci was the key to Matheson’s success, so if Ceci goes, Matheson could follow Pettersson and John Marino in having a decent 1st season in the black-and-gold, exciting the fans only to disappoint them the following season. Honestly, I would trade away all other options to make Matheson the most likely pick of the Seattle Kraken.

John Marino, like Pettersson was given a large, unearned raise after nothing more than 1-promising season only to fall short of fulfilling expectations the next season. However, in Marino’s case, although I wouldn’t be upset over a trade that cleared his $4+ million from the books, I would rather keep him and see what this season brings. Marino may have been a victim poor coaching. I am not sorry. You don’t ask your youngest defenseman to play his off-side, nor do you try and pair him with a partner that is an extreme defensive liability and then turn around and blame the kid you set up for failure.

Brian Dumoulin is the best defenseman on the roster, but let’s face it, that doesn’t necessarily mean much. He really has little to no competition.

Kris Letang is still a good offensive player but has little defensive acumen. Outside of offensive upside, the only other positive about Letang is that he is finally at the end of his contract and if sentimentality prevails and he stays it probably will be for a price more in line with his inability to defend.

Pierre-Olivier Joseph has shown some skills. Unfortunately, he is extremely light for his size and his skill set is a cookie-cutter skill set to every other defenseman on the team. If he is used as a sweetener in a deal for a more important prize, then so be it.

Coaching

However, if you want to argue that it wasn’t the players as much as the coaching, I am right there with you. Fact, Sidney Crosby ended the season 129th among forwards and 58th among centers with 200 or more 5-on-5 minutes played, in Points/60 minutes. Fifty-eighth among centers puts him down almost into 3rd line territory. How can this be? Did he lose that much of his skill?

Obviously no! The Captain must have had a hard time scoring when he was always trying to cover up for wandering defensemen.

The problem is systemic. Sullivan and Reirden are trying to drive the offense through the defense. They must think they have the 1992 – 93 Washington Capitals’ defense. That defense had 3 players score more than 20 Gs, Kevin Hatcher (35), Al Iafrate (25), and Sylvain Cote (21) and had 4 players with more than 40 points, Hatcher (79), Iafrate (66), Cote (50), and Calle Johansson (45).

The biggest 2 problems here is; A. that team didn’t win the Cup and lost to the Islanders in the 1st round as well, and; B. the only defenseman on the Penguins’ roster that could be put in the same breath as Hatcher, Iafrate, Cote, and Johansson, is Letang. End of story.

Seriously Sullivan and Reirden, do you really want Pettersson carrying the puck, not Crosby?

If you really want to emulate that Capitals team that didn’t get any farther than 1st round, then dump Matheson, Dumoulin, Ceci, Pettersson, and Marino and go out and get Cale Makar, Tyson Barrie, Jack Carlson, Adam Fox, and Jeff Petry to join Letang, or start coaching the team you do have and not the team you wish you had.

Now, Mr. Hextall, you can go out and get Hyman or any other forward you want.