Despite a first-round scare, the Penguins’ master plan for Cup success remains intact thanks to a stacked lineup and major deadline deals
The Stanley Cup champion and Olympic gold medallist is splayed out on his stomach, torso across the goal line, head in the net. Marc-André Fleury looks up, a mane of hair popping out from under his helmet, and takes an anxious peek toward the back of the net. There it is, the puck that bounced from the boards and off the back of his leg and into the twine, tying up game four of Pittsburgh’s first-round series with the New York Islanders at three apiece. A hard-luck goal, one that piles misery on a guy whose lacklustre play was already singling him out for blame as his team struggled to meet their lofty post-season expectations.
Heading into these playoffs, many thought that the Penguins, who posted the best record in the East and boast the most dangerous front six in hockey, would cruise to the Cup final. GM Ray Shero went all in at the trade deadline, bringing in big guns—Jarome Iginla, Douglas Murray, Brenden Morrow—to fortify an already lethal roster, just like he had en route to a finals appearance in 2008.
But four games into the post-season, things weren’t quite working out as planned. Due in large part to Fleury’s shaky play against a potent but unproven Islanders squad, the Pens looked beatable. The adamantium shield that protected this club through major injuries to both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin during the regular season was starting to look like tinfoil. Questions piled up. Are the Pens too weak on the blueline? Do they have the speed to contain young, explosive offences? Can you really win a playoff series when your starting goalie self-destructs and needs to be replaced by his backup halfway through the first round? Could Tomas Vokoun, who was stellar in the regular season but had only three playoff wins in 15 seasons, be the answer? And could Shero have done even more at the deadline? The panic button had officially been pushed.
Two days later? Crisis averted. In game five—the most critical of the series—the Pens looked every bit the Cup favourites they had been just a week earlier. In a rapid-fire second period, the Pens scored twice in just over a minute. Then Crosby capped it off with a beauty, one for his Hall of Fame reel, separating two defenders down the middle before beating the Islanders’ netminder clean. Even better was Vokoun’s stop on Isles star and Hart Trophy finalist John Tavares moments earlier on a breakaway. With a complete and dominant effort, Pittsburgh reminded everyone why they’re so dangerous and, more importantly, good enough to withstand the kind of goalie drama that would send most teams to the cottage this time of year.
The sun beat down through a clear Nashville sky in May almost exactly seven years ago. It was barely a week since the Predators had been eliminated from the first round of the ’06 playoffs—the first season they’d topped the 100-point mark in the club’s eight-year history—and then-assistant GM Ray Shero was already fielding offers from clubs interested in anointing him their new GM. The experience in Nashville had been a formative one for the young executive; he’d been given more responsibility than ever and was gleaning daily lessons from Preds GM David Poile, who had spent nearly three decades in the front office. So, facing the toughest decision of his career, Shero did what he always did in times of professional uncertainty: He picked up the phone and called his boss.
Shero respects Poile immensely. They had taken similar routes, both growing up around the game, born into NHL lineage. Poile’s old man was once the Philadelphia Flyers GM, while Shero’s father, Fred, coached the Broad Street Bullies. But more important than shared history, Poile had given him the biggest break of his career with the Predators. “When I got the job in Nashville, I called some of my peers who had run expansion teams and they all told me, ‘You have to hire the most experienced people you can get because your team’s not going to be very good and they’ll help cover up a lot of the mistakes,’” Poile recalls today. “Then I did the complete opposite.” Shero had spent the previous six seasons getting his feet wet with the Ottawa Senators, joining them in their second year of existence after a stint as a player agent, where he honed his negotiation skills and mastered the ins and outs of the league’s collective bargaining agreement. Shero, naturally, couldn’t have been happier. “I felt the experience to work with David, given all of his experience as a GM, was going to be beneficial for me down the road.”
In some ways, Shero’s moves in Pittsburgh have Poile’s fingerprints all over them. He doesn’t hesitate to trade picks and prospects, taking advantage of opportunities and making bold choices when they might not be the most popular. These were lessons learned in Nashville, lessons that Shero, the Pens and their fans are reaping the benefits of. “I always remember David to be very decisive,” Shero recalls. “David always told me: ‘To be a manager, you need to make decisions. Right or wrong, be decisive and stand by your actions.’”
On that spring day in Nashville, Poile knew exactly why Shero was calling before he even lifted the receiver. He’d heard about the job offers. “Well,” Shero asked his mentor. “What do you think I should do?” Poile didn’t miss a beat: “Remember what I told you about how being a general manager is about making decisions?”
Chris Kunitz beats Keith Aucoin to the corner boards, gets the puck and carries it toward the blueline, placing it on Douglas Murray’s stick. Murray floats a shot on goal; the puck hits Evgeni Nabokov’s shoulder, flies into the air and drops just behind the Isles’ goalie and into the net, giving the Pens a 2–0 lead in game five. While they would score two more before the buzzer sounds, this was the dagger that killed the Islanders’ hopes for an upset.
Murray, a bruising six-foot-three, 245-lb. presence, was acquired at the deadline from the San Jose Sharks to address a need on the blueline. The cost: a second round pick this year and a provisional pick in 2014. “You have a certain window and opportunity to win, and you want to take advantage of that,” Shero says, speaking with the confidence of a man who’s missed the playoffs just once in his seven years in Pittsburgh. “This was the year for me to be aggressive.”
Shero also set out to acquire depth and physicality on the front nine. So in addition to Murray, he plucked Brenden Morrow from Dallas for the Pens’ top defensive prospect, Joe Morrow, and made the most noise of all by bringing Iginla over from Calgary in exchange for his first-round pick this year (29th overall) and a pair of NCAA prospects. The two former captains, says Shero, have already become key voices in the dressing room, and their steady play on the ice helped the Pens down the stretch, during which they lost only four of the final 13 games.
Shero knows that big moves at the deadline, particularly when swapping promising youngsters for proven veterans, are make-or-break material for any GM. Do nothing and there’s nothing to lose. Or pull the trigger and hope there aren’t too many casualties. “Prospects are huge assets,” Shero says, “because as we’ve seen, you can flip them for guys like Kunitz or Morrow. But it’s not always the most popular move, and as a manager, I have put our staff at a disadvantage because I’ve traded a number of draft picks.”
Yet, despite all of Shero’s wheelin’ and dealin’, the water level in the Pens’ prospect pool remains high: the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins have made the playoffs for a league-record 11 straight seasons. Some of the kids have filled in admirably when called up, while others, like rookie Beau Bennett and third-year defenceman Matt Niskanen have assumed integral roles on this Pens club. Shero has struck the balance between youth and experience that GMs strive for, heeding the advice of former Devils GM Lou Lamoriello. “He always talked about his Devils teams as a class of players—you have your seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen who provide enthusiasm. That was important to address. You can’t have all older players or younger players, you need a good complement of guys who provide different roles.”
Eventually, after nearly 45 minutes on the phone on the eve of the playoffs, Shero tires of examining his moves, aware, it seems, that’s the answers won’t truly be clear until beard season. “A lot of stuff going out the door and a lot coming in,” he summarizes. “But what you do on the ice is what matters.” And in the first round, the Pens looked fragile, troubled by the Islanders’ speed. An issue compounded by coach Dan Bylsma’s preference to dump the puck out of the zone, allowing for chances the other way versus aggressive forechecking. It looked even worse in contrast; in the weeks that followed the deadline, the Penguins stormed through the back end of the season, despite losing Crosby to a broken jaw for the month of April. Even when hurt, they were strong: In games that either Crosby or Malkin missed this season, the Pens were 18-6. Since Shero took the Pittsburgh job, his team has a winning percentage in that scenario higher than .600, a testament to the club’s depth and construction. “They don’t get enough credit for that,” says Poile. “That’s why I say Ray should be executive of the year. His team looks like they can win it all again this season.”
Which is why it was so unnerving for Pittsburgh fans to see Fleury curled up inside his net during game four. But it shouldn’t have been; Shero had a plan for that, too. Vokoun, whom Shero signed in the off-season as insurance for an increasingly undependable Fleury, is playing some of the best hockey of his career; game five was the Czech’s first playoff shutout in more than nine years. “Vakouna matada—it means ‘no worries,’” read a sign standing out amongst the sea of black-and-white-clad Pens fans who packed the Consol Energy Center that night. It’s a cringe-worthy pun, without question, but also a frighteningly accurate reflection of how the Pens’ fortunes turned following the netminder’s 31-save shutout. And it’s not just Vokoun stepping up. Forward Tyler Kennedy is contributing after spending the first four games of the first round watching from the press box; Iginla, Morrow and Murray have all been solid; defenceman Kris Letang is proving why he’s a Norris Trophy finalist. Plus, the club still trots out the two best players in the game on any given night. Looks like everyone hit the panic button too early. Everyone, that is, except Ray Shero.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
