Bill Guerin looked across the ice and did a double take.
Less than 24 hours earlier he had been dealt from the last-place New York Islanders to the Pittsburgh Penguins, just minutes before the 2009 trade deadline.
Sure, the Pens were at that point out of a playoff spot, but they were the defending Eastern Conference champs, and recently hired head coach Dan Bylsma had breathed new life into the club.
The 38-year-old Guerin had barely had a chance to meet his new teammates, though he’d played against all of them at some point in his 19-year career. There he was, mid-shift in Sunrise, Fla., against the Panthers in his first game as a Penguin, shaking his head.
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Flying up the ice to his left were his new linemates: Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. Welcome to Pittsburgh.
“I felt young again, rejuvenated,” recalls Guerin, now an assistant GM with the Pens. “It was the most fun I’d had playing hockey in years. Just their energy, their excitement—those guys were so committed and a fun group. And we were good.”
Pittsburgh had it all. GM Ray Shero’s roster boasted a generation-defining superstar in Crosby and arguably his biggest challenger to the title in Malkin (the parallels to Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, the great Pens duo of the ’90s, were too enticing to ignore).
He surrounded his core with complementary pieces: veterans like Guerin; budding stars like Chris Kunitz; role players like Maxime Talbot and Matt Cooke; and a potent defence corps featuring a rising star in Kris Letang. Shero also had a promising up-and-coming goalie, Marc-André Fleury, playing in front of the NHL’s best home crowd.
A few months later, after a memorable seven-game rematch with the Detroit Red Wings, the Penguins hoisted the Stanley Cup for the first time in the Crosby era.
Guerin committed to come back for another year. Why wouldn’t he? Like his teammates, he saw what we all saw. It was, it seemed, the beginning of hockey’s next great dynasty.
Only it never happened.
In the years since, Pittsburgh hasn’t finished below second place in its division, while Crosby and Malkin have earned a Hart Trophy apiece along with three scoring titles combined.
Yet for all its regular-season dominance and individual accomplishments, this team has fallen short when it mattered, stockpiling a depressing list of playoff failures in the process—just last season they squandered a 3–1 lead to the New York Rangers in the second round.
It’s been five years since that Cup and the Penguins still haven’t made it back to the final.
Heading into the 2014–15 season, there is a new sense of urgency in Pittsburgh. Their stars are still firmly in their primes, but following the team’s biggest off-season changes in years, with a new regime desperate to make its mark, has the window already closed on this would-be dynasty?
If things feel different in Pittsburgh this year, that’s because they are. After the loss to the Rangers, the Pens axed Shero and Bylsma, the two men whose fingerprints are all over this team.
“Those two reshaped the culture here,” says Guerin, “but that’s the business. We’re going to add to what they gave us. Ray always tried to make us better and there were never any excuses with him. And Dan did amazing things here—he won a Cup and is the winningest coach in Penguins history. But just like with any other coach, there comes a time [for] change, and this was one of those cases.”
In his first move, new GM Jim Rutherford, architect of the 2006 Cup-champion Carolina Hurricanes, tabbed Mike Johnston to be the club’s next head coach. Previously with the WHL’s Portland Winterhawks, Johnston will be taking charge of an NHL team for the first time, and says he merely plans to tweak the existing system.
The hiring wasn’t a loud one—and that was the point. With the core firmly in place, Rutherford maintained he didn’t plan on making grand moves to disrupt what the Pens already have going.
And then draft night came around.
Inside the Penguins war room, two words served as the new regime’s mantra: balance and depth. And when Nashville called to inquire about star forward James Neal, Rutherford saw an opportunity to address both areas, shipping the 2011–12 all-star and 40-goal scorer to the Predators for Patric Hornqvist and Nick Spaling.
Neal had been an integral part of the Pens’ offence, and had developed killer chemistry alongside Malkin. But Hornqvist, who topped 20 goals in each of the past four seasons, and Spaling, a versatile skater who can play all three forward positions, are two pieces the Penguins feel can help them spread their talent across four lines.
Big changes have come on the blueline as well, with locker-room leader Brooks Orpik and power-play quarterback Matt Niskanen lost in free-agency and replaced, in part, by Christian Ehrhoff.
Despite the fresh blood in the organization, however, the Penguins universe continues to revolve around Malkin and Crosby. They’re the reason the Penguins will always have a shot at the Cup.
But having two franchise superstars on one team can also have its unintended drawbacks.
“Having Geno and having Sid is a luxury. They’re our aces in the hole, but do we rely on them too much?” asks Guerin. “Probably. When you see the things that they do, it’s hard not to.”
To wit: Last season, 63.6 percent of all Penguins goals saw one or both of Crosby and Malkin register a point, a full five percent higher than any other duo in hockey.
In addition to their stars, the Pens will also bank on a healthy group of returning veterans and hope for a solid campaign from Marc-André Fleury, who enters the final year of a seven-year contract.
Fleury has received the lion’s share of the Pens’ playoff-collapse criticism in recent years, and despite his heroics in ’09, his job status remains under constant scrutiny.
The 29-year-old from Sorel, Que., has always been solid in the regular season—he owns a 2.36 GAA to go along with a .916 save percentage and has won 70 percent of his starts over the past four years.
But even last season in what was, statistically, his first solid playoffs since the Penguins’ Cup win, there were still those familiar momentary lapses in judgment. It leaves the door open for steady-if-unspectacular 28-year-old backup Thomas Greiss to win the job, though for now, at least, Fleury is the man.
Continuity amidst change. It’s a strange concept.
That the Pens have reached the playoffs in eight straight seasons and are still considered underachievers speaks to the natural expectations surrounding a team so loaded with talent.
When they won the Cup in their second straight final appearance on the backs of a couple kids with their best hockey ahead of them, they seemed destined to return again and again. But were our expectations realistic in the first place?
Since 1990, no team has made it to three consecutive finals, and only the Red Wings and Devils have won more than two Cups—and Detroit’s four championships in that span were spread across more than a decade.
What was the norm as recently as the ’80s with the Islanders and Oilers is no longer; aside from a deeper league, the salary cap has made it harder for teams like Chicago and Pittsburgh to acquire big-name players when so much money is tied to existing stars.
Then again, Sid and Geno are still just 27 and 28, respectively, and the pair are locked up until 2021. With an organizational shift only beginning to take effect, a group of players asked to step up and fill new roles (not to mention their best defenceman, Letang, who the team hopes is fully recovered from a stroke suffered last season), and an ugly trend of playoff disappointments in the rear-view, this season won’t be easy.
But it will be different.
“The [playoff] shortcomings are what they are and we can blame it on whatever we want,” says Guerin. “The bottom line is we just haven’t been good enough. Change will hopefully be good for us, give us a shot in the system.”
Hey, it worked the last time around. Guerin was there. So were Crosby, Malkin, Kunitz, Dupuis and Fleury. They know there’s enough talent to pull out any given playoff series. A balanced group ready to rally around its new coach like the Penguins did for Bylsma five years ago.
In a wide-open Eastern Conference, with the two most talented forwards in the game, the dynasty may be in jeopardy, but that doesn’t mean this team still can’t win it all.
As Guerin puts it: “We’re not dead yet.”
