The Penguins: to Sign or Not to Sign (or Should Not Have Signed)

This morning I happened to be talking to our good friend Rick Buker at our favorite fitness facility, Wright’s Gym and Krav Maga. As is our wont, the subject of our favorite flightless fowl came up. The discussion began focused on Rick’s most recent posting, UFA Will Butcher being signed by the black and gold and our team’s love affair with under-sized players.

I reminded Rick of a Defenseman I proposed as a FA signing several years ago, Oliwer Kaski.

We also discussed the poorly thought out signing of Tristan Jarry.

Rick suggested I turn our discussion into an article. Without further ado, Rick B and my Penguin Talk.

The Laziness of the Jarry Signing

I am so sick of listening to the less than sophisticated defenses I have heard for Kyle Dubas’ re-signing Tristan Jarry – “Who else could he have signed?” What a ridiculous response.

Before I go any further, let us look at some cold hard realities. The average back-up goalie in the NHL plays between 15 and 30 games with 22 Games Played (GP sitting roughly in the middle of that range.

So, what does that have to do with the price of tea in the proverbial foreign land? You may ask.

Simply put, $5.375 Million per year is way too much to pay for a back-up Goalie!

“What! Jarry a back-up Goalie, are you nuts TOR!!!” He has been named to 2 NHL All Star Games.

Calm down defenders of the sub-par Tristan Jarry.

To use our friend Mike’s and many others’ arguments about eye tests, since his entrance into the NHL, I have never viewed Jarry as a starting NHL quality Goalie, the eye test just nagged at me. Yet everyone else kept hailing him as a superstar.

Whenever the friends of Jarry cited his 2 – All Star game appearances, I calmly tried to remind the Rabid Jarrians with the reality of the NHL All Star game; that NHL spectacle requires each team be represented, no matter how low quality the players on that roster and the players are chosen by the fans, not merit.

Now, after this latest Pittsburgh Penguins signing/re-signing faux pas with the resultant clamoring to defend a defenseless inking, I chose to look at the empirical, objective data. An NHL back-up Goalie plays between 15 and 30 games with 22 GP the rough mean, I crunched the numbers of Tristan Jarry’s career. I discarded the seasons he played only 1 and 2 games; the other 5 seasons are listed in the table below.

Up through the mid-range of a back-up Goalie, Tristan Jarry can, at times, look like an All-Star. The numbers bear that out. In his career, Jarry has a Save Percentage (Sv%) of 0.922 and Goals Against Average (GAA) of 2.43. As a back-up, Jarry would have value.

However, look at what happens after the 22^nd GP by Jarry; the Goalie’s Sv% plunges all the way down to 0.904 and his GAA jumps to 2.88. After game 22 in a season, Jarry becomes a liability. Only once in the 5 seasons that Jarry has played more than 22 games has he been equal or better after game 22 than before game 22 and that was the COVID delayed season when teams only played within their own division.

So now I repeat, Jarry is not a starting NHL level Goalie, he physically can’t shoulder that load. No matter how much you like the man, or how bruised your ego, as a fan, will get, Jarry has not shown he has what it takes to be a number 1 Goalie. After Jarry plays his 22^nd game in a season, most Goalies in the NHL and in the Penguins’ pipeline are at least equal to Jarry and often better. I would rather pay Joel Blomqvist or Taylor Gauthier to see what they have rather than suffer through another Jarry meltdown after he hits his wall.

To sign a back-up Goalie for $5.375 million per years for 5 years is ASS-A-Nine. Dubas and his Head Coach, Mike Sullivan, need to start doing their homework before good money after bad.

Oliwer Kaski

An Unrestricted Free Agent (UFA) the Penguins should go after is a Finnish Defensemen that I wanted the team to sign back in 2019-20, Oliwer Kaski. In the summer of 2019, during my usual unsolicited advice columns aimed at then GM Jim Rutherford, I suggested that he should try to sign 3 European Free Agents (FA), Kaski, Ilya Mikheyev (Forward), and Adam Reideborn (Goalie). Instead, Rutherford opted to sign Oula Palve (Center) and Emil Larmi (Goalie).

The Detroit Red Wings signed Kaski. Unfortunately for both the Wings and Kaski, things didn’t work out. The then 21 year old Defensemen didn’t make the Red Wings roster and was banished to Detroit’s farm team in Grand Rapids. Furthermore, Detroit didn’t show much patience, after only 19 GP in Grand Rapids, they traded Kaski to the Carolina Hurricanes and was summarily sent to their farm team in Charlotte.

Carolina was also a poor fit for Kaski. Carolina was loaded with defensive prospects that were being rated highly. Therefore, to get playing time, Kaski, like Filip Hållander and Filip Lindberg, abandoned his NHL dreams and ran back to Europe and had several good seasons, while Carolina retained his rights.

Kaski has good size, a really hard shot that has earned him double digits in Goals (G) in most of his pro seasons and he is mobile.

This summer Carolina relinquished their rights to Kaski. He is still under contract to play one more season for HV71 Jonkoping but the SHL finishes their season before the NHL. I would seriously consider tempting Kaski back across the pond. The big Finn, at 27 is now entering his prime as a Defenseman. He may not come as cheap as he was in 2019 but he certainly would be cheaper than most of the NHL veterans that Dubas and Sullivan will chase. In an environment where cost is most certainly part of the equation of every team, Kaski should be considered as an answer for the short term and long term.

Will Butcher

I wanted the team to sign Will Butcher when he first left College. Therefore, I have no problem with the signing of Butcher; at least in theory. He is a a Sullivan-type player and actually may statistically play well during the regular season, in Sullivan’s opposite world. Even with a more reasonable Coach, the signing of Butcher could be of a benefit in Wilkes Barre – Scranton (WBS) and a better option for call up than Chad Ruhwedel.

The New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres teams that Butchered toiled on were very bad teams. If Dubas could continue to improve the team’s roster, bringing in more size to protect the smaller players, then Butcher could even return to the flash and promise he showed in 2017-18.

Conclusions

Rick Buker asked the question (a couple of days ago) are the Penguins a better team now than they were 2-weeks ago. Iin my usual verbose manner, rambled around a bit when I responded to him, but the Reader’s Digest version of my answer is that I do think the team did get better in terms of its future; not MUCH BETTER as some talking heads are preaching, but they are definitely moving in a better direction. If Dubas could manage to lure Kaski back to the NHL, I would have a very positive outlook for the future, even though Dubas left way too many better prospects on the board in the first round of the draft.

However, in the immediate future, this coming season, they really are not any better than the team that lost its final 2 games to bottom teams in the league when all they needed was an Over-Time Loss (OTL), to make it to the big dance. The team is still stuck without a legitimate NHL starter. The UFA Goalie the team has signed (or in this case re-signed) has performed from barely adequate to downright miserable after game 22 of every season he has played in.

Even if Dubas finds a way to trade for Erik Karlsson, I don’t see a Stanley Cup in the future of this team. Yes, I could easily see them make a solid regular season run, fade in the stretch run, when Jarry pulls his regular season slump, and then get knocked out in the first round, continuing Sullivan’s streak of first round futility.

This team lacks the generational talents, in their prime, to impose Sullivan’s inverted strategies effectively.