Penguins’ Postmortem and Grading

I haven’t written much this season, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been following our favorite flightless fowl. Now we are at the end of one more farcical season, and it is time for a postmortem for the 6^th Pittsburgh Penguins’ corpse, in a row.

Some Penguins’ fans are angry, even more are frustrated, but these emotions are predicated on each fan’s expectations of the team. For those Penguin Poop readers that remember my preseason predictions, they will remember that once again I was pretty much spot on. My only error this past season was in thinking that at least Sidney Crosby, or Evgeni Malkin would fail to play all 82 games. Everything else I wrote about happened.

Therefore, I am neither angry nor frustrated. In the wake of just one more Mike Sullivan debacle if you are thinking I am gloating, I am not doing that either. Like someone sitting too far back to help, watching a disaster happen, I am just sad; sad that no one seems to really want to use logic and fix the problem.

Even now, in the wake of (to paraphrase the Moody Blues) “another useless season’s energy spent”. Players, Coaches, GM, Media, and Fans either try and deflect blame from themselves or just jump on their favorite scapegoat, regardless of what the facts are. Even Kyle Dubas goes after an easy target, this seasons Jack Johnson, Ryan Graves when he said that Sullivan’s system wasn’t to blame for the poor season put in by Graves.

When I look at this team, the only thing that I care about were the results and the results show, despite a late season surge when Sullivan’s favorites were either injured or benched, the team finished 19^th in the league. When grading this team everyone needs to share in the blame and their grades should reflect the team’s poor record.

Grading the team as a whole: C-

A 19^th place finish puts our Penguins just on the edge of the bottom third of the league. Therefore, my grade for the team is a C-. This team stunk for the bulk of the season, spending a good portion of the campaign in the bottom third at 24^th in the league.

Grading the skaters:

As I have said, I only care about results, not popularity contests. Many fans and Penguin Poop readers may get angry over my grades because their favorite player got a bad grade but the truth is I only recorded the grade each player earned. What is the old saying “true words are seldom pretty, and pretty words are seldom true”, well the truth is this team WAS NOT PRETTY!

To grade the players, I went to Natural Stat Trick and determined the mean TOI of all skaters, separating Forwards from Defensemen. I then determined the Mean and Standard Deviation for TOI for both groups and limited my averages and players I graded to those whose playing time was within 1 standard deviation below the mean.

I then compared the players Primary Points (Pnts’), or their Goals (G) plus their Primary Assists (A’) to the league average for Forward or Defenseman, setting the mean at 75% just as like curving a test grade. I used Pnts’ to consider players individual effort. (during 5-on-5 play). I then considered their team offensive and defensive play by repeating the above process while looking at their On-Ice Team Goals For (TGF) and Team Goals Against (TGA).

After looking at these 5-on-5 stats, I added a consideration this season. I then sorted the players stats under all strengths (Even Strength, Power Play, Penalty Kill, etc) but limited their production to when the game was tied, so as to add a clutch (play under a high-pressure situation) statistic to the grade.

I then averaged the 4 grades for the final grade.

Grading the Forwards

I hate to break it to the Malkin haters and the Crosby fans but despite Crosby winning the player popularity contest of complete player, the captain of our boys of winter absolutely stunk defensively this past season. He and his linemates bled out GA just as fast as they scored them. Sid’s TGA was a full 2 standard deviations above the mean. I won’t argue with anyone who prefers to offer up excuses rather than just accept that Crosby was not at his best defensively this season. I would also blame a portion of these abysmal stats on the poor goaltending of Tristan Jarry and the Head Coach who twice this season, in interviews that he had no answers, during long losing streaks.

However, I would qualify my acceptance of those arguments, particularly to the Malkin haters, that Malkin finished the season 2 standard deviations above Crosby so stop your ridiculous, unfounded prejudice against Geno, he did protect his goalie far better than Sid. The big Russian and his linemates may not have scored as many Gs as Sid but he gave up far less. The G differential was such that when Malkin was on the ice the line was + 0.5 Gs while Crosby and his line was only + 0.2 Gs during 5-on-5 and light years different when the score was tied, Malkin and his line mates score 2.08 more TGF compared to Crosby and his mates 0.99.

I would also counter the Malkin haters chants of Crosby had to face opponents top lines with the Captain not only got to play with our only legitimate top 6 winger but he also got the benefit of playing the vast majority of time with consistent linemates that he has played with 4 seasons, Malkin put up his numbers against other teams top 6 players while toiling with a revolving door of middle 6 wingers, at best.

I also want to respond to a comment about Malkin and Give Away (Gv)

Malkin wasn’t in the top 3 Gv artists this past season as someone recently suggested. He did finish close to the top 3 but the top 3 Gv players were,

3) Sidney Crosby: 57 (there he is again, the Captain playing poor defense)

2) Kris Letang: 64

1) Erik Karlsson: 71

On the flip side of this equation, Geno led the team in Take Aways, by a country mile,

3) Lars Eller: 54

2) Sidney Crosby: 69

1) Evgeni Malkin: 90

Malkin did earn his B. I crunched these numbers in a blind fashion not looking at names until the analysis was done.

Defensemen

I was not and still am not a fan of the Erik Karlsson trade. He really never fulfilled the promise that Dubas and the talking heads sold the fan base on. However, I never fell for their propaganda. History shows that Karlsson never has had back-to-back great seasons, his production always drops off. However, having wrote that, he was the best of the Keystone Kops with which Sullivan prefers to condemn this team.

Okay, that is a more than a little harsh. I do understand that none of those players, nor any player in the NHL could skate through a brick wall, nor will any defenseman truly maximize their talent under Sullivan. They will all suffer systemic defensive lapses. Even when winning their last Cup, after Sullivan was finally able to install HIS system, our hometown heroes ended up with the 2^nd worst CORSI of that playoff year. Sullivan’s defensive system is fatally flawed.

Goaltending

For Goaltending, I graded them in a similar way as the skaters, but I chose to consider the Goalie’s Save Percentages Sv%, splitting the consideration to High Danger Save Percentage (HDSv%), Medium Danger Save Percentage (MDSv%) and Low Danger Save Percentage (LDSv%), weighing the HDSv% higher than the MDSv% and the MDSv% higher than the LDSv%, under the 5-on-5 condition. I then repeated the process under all strengths but limiting it to when the game was tied to get a better idea of why Alex Nedeljkovic had so much better of W-L record than Jarry despite having similar Sv%.

Looking at these data, it is rather easy to see why Jarry’s W-L record was horrible. He continually put the team behind the 8-ball by saving his worst performances while the game was tied. It also does explain many of the players’ bad seasons. This team had to constantly fight back from holes that Jarry dug them, justifying some people’s assertion that the team played differently in front of Nedeljkovic compared to Jarry.

Remember, I did write that signing Jarry was a horrible idea. As a former Goalie, I have no, repeat no respect for Jarry’s technical skills as a Goalie. Part of my off-season pipe dreams (I don’t expect it to come true, is Dubas finds a taker and our Penguins get out from under Jarry and sign Ned long enough to be a bridge until Joel Blomqvist is mature enough to take the reigns – as the starter.

Coaching

Mike Sullivan: F

Todd Reirden: F

Mike Vellucci: C+

Even though I give the team a C-, I have to give Sullivan an F for coaching. He absolutely mismanaged the players he was given. He had Crosby, Malkin, Letang, and Karlsson and couldn’t make the playoffs. Part of the reason was that he chose to die on the Tristan Jarry hill. He told Dubas, this past offseason that he would not find a better Goalie than Jarry and to sign him at all costs. He then kept riding Jarry despite Jarry’s horrible performance after horrible performance.

More than anyone else on this team, it was Sullivan’s hubris that doomed this team to early tee times. Not only did Sullivan ride the glue factory horse Jarry, but our ersatz coach also buried prospects like Valterri Puustinen, Drew O’Connor, Radim Zohorna, and Sam Poulin, who all outplayed veterans like Matt Nieto, Vinnie Hinostroza, and Noel Acciari. Jansen Harkens didn’t even come to the team until the last preseason game, he had no way of winning a roster spot over the above home-grown players.

The team’s horrible 3-on-3 play was also directly on Sullivan.

Even in the end, when the team was playing their first meaningless game in forever, Sullivan failed to set the table for the future. Even when he had the opportunity to give players like Puustenin, O’Connor, Zohorna, Poulin and even Blomqvist a chance for quality time to hone their skills against big league talent and start evaluating them for next season, Sullivan fumbled the ball.

Unfortunately, FSG and Dubas still refuse to acknowledge the painfully obvious. Anywhere else throughout the league or in any other sport would a coach get away with what Sullivan continually skates past.

As for Reirden, what a joke. With all of the talent at his disposal, our Power Play (PP) coach only managed to get them to rank 29^th in the league in terms of TGF/60 power play time. On the other hand, Reirden’s PP had the worst TGA while on the PP.

Both Sullivan and Reirden need to be fired to maximize any potential next season’s team may have.

However, Vellucci and his Penalty Kill PK was a little above average. They finished 12^th in the league in terms of TGA/60 PK.

For those of you who want to completely clean house, I won’t argue. The PK didn’t set the world on fire. However, for those of you who want some level of consistency, I wont’s argue with you either. Vellucci may not have really hurt this team, and he was always a winner, everywhere else he has been. It has only been under Sullivan that his reputation has begun to suffer.

Bottom Line

Like it or not, these are the grades the team earned. I did not color any of the grades with my predispositions, as most fans and media types like to do. Some players I don’t like scored higher than players I would have liked to have played better and vice versa.