Our friend Jim noted in a comment to a previous Rick Buker post, “This had to happen and now it did!!!” You are sooooo, right my friend. This Pittsburgh Penguins loss to the New York Rangers, like Thanos in the Marvel Universe, was inevitable. Those, like Jim and myself, and anyone willing to take off the rose-colored glasses and really look at this team could see the rotting bones beneath this whited sepulcher. Despite high profile players like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang, our Penguins were never a true Stanley Cup contender. Coaching and poor management decisions made this loss inevitable.
That’s right, if you have guessed by the tone of that opening statement, I have come to bury Caesar not to praise him. To be sure, this Penguins team has brought us many, many years of big-time hockey for our ocular pleasure and for that I am eternally grateful but it is over now.
As the Bard noted in the voice of Mark Antony
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;”
So let it be with this incarnation of our Penguins. To all things comes an end.
The Good the Team Did:
Thank you, Sidney Crosby, thank you Evgeni Malkin, thank you Kris Letang, thank you Jake Guentzel, Bryan Rust, and Brian Dumoulin too. Sid, Geno, Kris, you brought us 3 Cups and 4 Final’s appearances. Jake, Bryan, and Brian, you were integral to at least one if not 2 of those Cups. Your place in Penguins lore is etched eternally.
Furthermore, the afore mentioned with Jeff Carter, Danton Heinen, and Tristan Jarry exceeded my expectations for this past season. I never thought this team would make the post season and they even got me to believe, for a moment, they may actually get to the 2nd round.
Thank you, the players on this Penguins team.
The Evil that some men did
So, as I mourn another 1st round playoff loss, I will be tormented with the “what might have beens”. I have already read and heard many fans and writers try to ascribe blame to this player or that player. The bottom line is this, the coaches and the GMs pick the players on the team, decide on the strategies the players employ, and have the power to retrain the players or replace them. No player can be blamed, this late in the season, without blaming the coach first.
If not for decisions by Coaches who were employed several seasons past their usefulness (Dan Bylsma and Mike Sullivan) and GMs (referring to Ray Shero and Jim Rutherford not Ron Hextall) too short-sighted or too timid to make the tough decisions, I contend this team was denied at least 2 more appearances in the Finals and possibly more.
Many times, I have voiced my displeasure over the GM’s and Coach’s decisions, in particular the mortgaging the future when the team really didn’t have a legitimate shot at a title in a particular season. However, a full discussion of the reason for a 4th consecutive 1st round loss, a post-mortem, is a topic for another discussion. (I promised I would only be burying Caesar). Suffice it to say, the poor waif born out of risky behavior of Management, these past 4 years will be living long after this era becomes nothing more than legend.
An Epilogue:
As I wrote at the top, this team exceeded my expectations, so I am not as miserable this morning (mourning) after as many fans are, who allowed themselves to believe the hype. I am more astonished at how far our Waddling Waterfowl pushed the New York team whose talented core if much younger. Our once heavy weight champions to the Rangers right up to the brink, overtime of a game 7.
Now that our Penguins enter the off-season, I can see Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet on his hand, fingers prepared to snap, and I am girding myself for the resultant disappearing of familiar faces from this roster. Will Letang, Rust, and Malkin, along with Rickard Rakell, Brian Boyle, Evan Rodrigues, Nathan Beaulieu (without ever playing a game in the regular season or playoffs), Casey DeSmith, Louis Domingue, Jusso Riikola, Kaspari Kapanen, and Danton Heinen fade into the dust and off the big-league roster? Time will tell.
Hey Coach,
Thanks for the kind words above my friend. As always you have written a well balanced ,well researched and a literary master piece. I too have many thoughts to write about but it may be a week or two premature to publish my post, but for now I want to comment on just one issue. Money. $$$$
Everyone of our upcoming Free Agents want to return if they can get the Contract THEY want. Hence lies the problem. Money. Because of the Jack Johnson buy out we will be paying him more money next year and one media source reported that will offset most of the meager 1 million dollar Salary cap increase for 2023. Dead cap space.
To add more injury to the fire,what if the NEW Fenway Ownership Group decides that we can NOT spend to the Maximum Cap limit for 2023, because we are not a real Cup contending team anymore with out serious personnel changes.
As you know Coach only 18 NHL teams spent to the limit in 2022 .
Even a five million dollar cut from our current level of spending will only make matters worse for who ever is the GM for 2023. All this to say the Team needs to cut salaries in order to replace some of the unproductive talent and to secure more younger, faster and bigger talent to build around.
Elliot Friedman said Monday that Letang was way off in the length of contract and compensation he wanted to receive and that both sides are far, far apart. With Geno he said the Pen’s offered a three year extension to match Sid’s but he wanted to much money than they were willing to pay. I suspect it is the Alex Ovechkin situation that clouds the issue..
Rust said he would love to return but he wants to be paid what he believes he is worth.You can not blame him.
It seems that there will be no one giving us a TEAM Friendly Deal anymore. … A Real issue and a REAL PROBLEM !
Cheers OTR
Jim
Hey Rick,
Thank you Jim for the kind words.
Hockey is a business, sports are not sports anymore but businesses. Money drives everything.
As a player, I appreciate what Letang has done in Pgh but I am not sure how I view his loss. I love his grit and passion but his defensive lapses drive me crazy. The biggest point for trying to keep him is there is NO plan B. There is no player or prospect in the pipeline that comes close to him. Not that is think he is necessarily that good, it is just we have a black hole on D.
As for Geno, he is the single best offensive talent on this team. I would love to find a way to keep him, but I won’t blame him if he leaves. There are way too many Penguins Fans who hate him that if I were Geno I would double my demands to have to play in their city. I don’t want him to go, but am pretty much resigned to the “inevitable.”
Rust? I have always liked Rust too. If Rick B will stretch his memory back to the first Cup year in a discussion he and I had, I said that with all of the High Danger Chances Rust gets himself with his speed, if he ever develops a scoring touch he will be great. Rust had a great and most consistent season this year but he still had a short slump. I wouldn’t blame him for chasing the money. I haven’t thought exactly how much I would offer to keep him and I would be interested in hearing how much he thinks he is worth.
The most interesting thing you bring up is how all the players want to stay with the team but want paid. I wonder if they have thought about where the team would get that money and what kind of math they would have to use to juggle the numbers under the Cap? You can only stuff 5lbs of Cr@9 into a 5lb bag.
Exactly Coach…
What people fail to realize is even if the Cap went up 5 million dollars more today and we sign all our aging, high priced free agents to 5 year contracts…..They can NOT get the job done which is winning the Stanley CUP !
The last four years speak for themselves.
Our team has a lack of talent overall and we need more talent at all positions to win a Cup. Real elite talent.
Where do we get that coach ? Someone answer me that please ?
JIM
Jim,
Amen Jim, Amen, our “core” is over 34 and we have no top 6 Forward prospect or top D pair prospects in the system. True we have a handful of intriguing kids but no bona fide kids to replace them. That is why, as much of a Malkin fan as I am, I would have been ok with a trade to Florida for Anton Lundle. If you recall, I wanted the Pens to find a way to trade up to get him in the draft.
I think the worst problem the team has right now is how much of their Cap space is tied up in underperforming, over-paid defensemen. If JR hadn’t been so reckless with the money he spent on the blue line. Oh well, nothing can be done about that now. Wasting energy, thinking about that is about as useful as thinking about the what ifs of what if the Pens had read and heeded my post a couple of years back and signed Ilya Mikheyev, Oliwer Kaski, and Adam Reideborn rather than Oula Palve and Emil Larmi. The team needs to focus that energy to climb out of this hole.
That up hill climb will be worth watching to see what GMRH does.
Hey Rick,
GREAT piece…clever and creative as always. It will, indeed, be interesting to see how that waif you spoke of progresses. The one thing we have going for us? I don’t think Fenway Sports Group sank $900,000,000 million into the team to watch us flounder for four or five seasons like we did in the early 2000s.
It’ll be interesting to see how the ownership meshes with Hextall and his patient, build-through-the-draft approach, or more appropriately, vice versa.
I think we can expect some changes in the coming weeks and months…maybe significant ones.
Rick
Thanks Rick,
You set the bar pretty high, just trying to keep up.
Agreed, I don’t think the Fenway group is going to be too patient. The rumor mill is already churning. A certain mutual Caps friend has been texting me every rumor he can find about this player of that leaving Pgh, particularly trying to link a UFA Center going to join a countryman in the nationals capital.
I won’t be drawn into any of those discussions…..yet.