The season of the Pittsburgh Penguins is not yet lost.
It just feels that way.
Indeed, the Penguins’ 2009 Stanley Cup championship, one that felt like the beginning of something truly special, suddenly feels a lot further away than five years — at least today. The club blessed with generational talent has seen this season — one that started with a major overhaul in the front office and coaching staff designed to put it over the top — devolve into a difficult trudge to the regular season finish line.
“It’s a little depressing,” allowed veteran defenceman Rob Scuderi following his team’s puzzling/mortifying 4-3 overtime loss to the charging Ottawa Senators on Tuesday night.
The Pens led 3-0 that night, just as they led Philly 1-0 the game before and lost, just as they’d led Columbus 2-0 the game before that and lost. Injuries are a significant part of this, and we’ll get to that, but right now this seems to be a former champion with a serious crisis of confidence, no longer certain it has the wherewithal to put seemingly inferior opponents away.
That’s led to a 3-8-2 slide and a precarious hold on an Eastern Conference wild card position with two games left before the playoffs begin. Those playoffs, we always assumed, would include Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Co., and still may. We’ve seen the Los Angeles Kings — coincidentally also in major post-season jeopardy — take a low playoff seeding and turn it into a Cup, but somehow these Penguins don’t seem the type, do they?
Last summer, GM Jim Rutherford and head coach Mike Johnston replaced Ray Shero and Dan Bylsma, respectively, when co-owners Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle grew restless over the team’s inability to find its way back to the winner’s circle. More than that, a series of stunning playoff losses, two in which the team held three games to one series leads, apparently convinced Lemieux and Burkle that they had the right horses but the wrong jockeys.
Now, both Rutherford and Johnston are starting to face some mild criticism, albeit with the caveat in most corners that they’ve only been on the job for 80 games. That said, they weren’t brought in to gradually develop a winner. They were hired to put this team over the top immediately, to make Crosby the player to receive the Cup from Gary Bettman in June.
Right now, that seems as remote a possibility as Tiger Woods winning The Masters. (You know, in the anything-is-possible-but-wouldn’t-bet-on-it category.)
If the Pens don’t make it to the post-season — a home start against the Islanders on Friday and a road game against the cellar-dwelling Buffalo Sabres will decide Pittsburgh’s fate — nobody seems exactly clear on whether the organizational renovation of last summer could repeat itself.
More specifically, there’s plenty of local speculation that Lemieux and Burkle, semi-convincing last summer in their explanations of why the Shero/Bylsma combo had to go, may no longer be the happy partners they’ve been perceived to be.
Some suggest the traditionally reclusive Lemieux is most distressed with how he’s lost control over the hockey operation, and would very much like to regain that control.
But that’s mostly speculation at this point. What is known is that on March 14 the Penguins were four points out of first place in the Eastern Conference despite having had to deal with injuries/illnesses to Crosby, Malkin, Kris Letang and Christian Erhoff along the way. They seemed part of the grab bag of Eastern Conference contenders, as capable as anyone else of coming out of the conference and challenging the western champion for the Cup.
Since then, the Rangers have soared to the top despite a serious injury to goalie Henrik Lundqvist, while Andrew Hammond and the Senators have dramatically closed the gap between themselves and the teams hanging on to the final playoff spots in the east. As it stands, Detroit and Boston are in just as much trouble as Pittsburgh, with the Red Wings suddenly uncertain as to which of their goalies should play on a regular basis and Boston a perplexing squad that was shut out by Braden Holtby and the Capitals on Wednesday night for the third time this season.
All three teams — the Pens, the Wings, the Bruins — have been among the best in both the east and the league for some time, and all three appear to be suffering the consequences of an aging lineup and the restrictions of the salary cap system.
Pittsburgh, with one of the oldest teams in the league, is the only squad paying two centres $9 million each a season. Next year, the Chicago Blackhawks will start to absorb a $21 million combined cap hit for Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, but for now, that cap hit sits at $13 million, giving the Hawks wiggle room that Pittsburgh doesn’t have.
Neither Crosby nor Malkin have been blessed with a star winger in recent seasons, partly because the team can’t afford to pay those two and Letang $7.5 million a season, partly because Pittsburgh hasn’t drafted a top 20 scorer since Jordan Staal in 2006, and partly because any number of half-solutions haven’t quite worked.
This year, David Perron was acquired from Edmonton to be that player, and again, it hasn’t quite worked. The cost was a first round pick, and the nightmare (if very remote) scenario in Pittsburgh now is that the Penguins miss the playoffs, and then see that pick win the lottery and deliver Connor McDavid to the Oilers.
For a franchise accustomed to landing generational talents like Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr and Crosby by a wide variety of methods and fortuitous circumstances, this would be a most cruel twist of fate.
Crosby is tied for the league lead in scoring with John Tavares of the Islanders and Jamie Benn of Dallas, while Malkin sits in 14th place despite having missed 13 games. Overall, however, Pittsburgh is in the bottom half of the league in offence and No. 10 in team defence despite a strong power play and excellent penalty killing this season. Only Edmonton and Dallas have fewer divisional wins, suggesting that the teams that regularly see the Penguins (9-16-4 against Metropolitan teams) are figuring them out quickly.
Patric Hornqvist, when healthy, has been a good player with 25 goals, and Chris Kunitz and Brandon Sutter have had reasonably good offensive seasons. But the dropoff after that is fairly dramatic, and the loss of Pascal Dupuis (blood clots) has created a hole in the lineup Rutherford was unable to fill. Indeed, the addition of Daniel Winnik from the Maple Leafs at the trade deadline put the Pens dangerously close to the salary cap, so much so they’ve had to go shorthanded on occasion.
Letang’s injuries have limited him to 69 games. Olli Maatta was lost for the season after a cancer scare, and Ehrhoff remains out. That’s created a back end that has put a big burden on players like Ben Lovejoy and youngster Derrick Pouliot, cited as a major reason the club has been unable to protect leads with confidence.
Pouliot, Maatta and minor-league netminder Matt Murray are good young players, but the costs of going for it in 2013 by spending futures to acquire Jarome Iginla, Brendan Morrow and Douglas Murray are having the expected impact on the depth chart. Maatta (8th in 2012) is the only top 20 pick the Penguins have had in the past seven drafts, a direct result of the team’s success.
Jake Muzzin was drafted out of the Soo but never signed, and the L.A. Kings have turned him into a top-four defender. Former first rounder Simon Depres, 23, was sent to Anaheim for the 31-year-old Lovejoy this year at the trade deadline, and now there’s no first round pick this June for the second time in three years.
It adds up. In today’s NHL, success catches up with you eventually, particularly if you carry expensive stars that compel you to aggressively try to win it all when you can.
So that ’09 Cup sits there alone. Maybe if not for a concussion to Crosby in 2011 the Pens would have won that year, and maybe if not for a broken jaw in ’13 that season would have produced another Cup.
But neither happened, and Crosby and Malkin, along with goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, seem to be surrounded with less five years after winning it all. In a low-scoring NHL where the impact of their offensive wizardry is limited, the result to this point is a Pittsburgh team that is reeling now and apparently in decline.
