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The Pittsburgh Penguins: the Tidal of the NHL |
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We’re one-third of the way through March, with one month left in the NHL’s 2015-16 regular season, and the Pittsburgh Penguins are fighting for their playoff lives. For the second straight year. With a different head coach than the one they had last year, and numerous changes to the roster they had last year. And with some of the planet’s very best players in their employ.
This boggles the mind. This feels unnatural. This is like a slew of staggeringly talented musicians banding together to form a streaming service nobody’s willing to pay for. Your mouth drops when you consider the talent involved, and drops even further when their decision to form a collective doesn’t produce a result commensurate to that talent.
That’s right. That’s where I’m going here. The Penguins: the Tidal of the NHL.
Entering Thursday night’s action, the Pens were only a single point ahead of the slumping Red Wings for the first wild card playoff berth in the Eastern Conference, and just three points ahead of the surging, ninth-place Philadelphia Flyers (who have a game in hand on them). If the Penguins fall apart over the course of their final 16 games, there’s a decent possibility they’ll finish behind the Carolina Hurricanes.
I’ll let you finish your spit take before you continue reading.
Yes, a team that has Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and Marc-Andre Fleury on it might finish beneath a team in the embryonic stages of a rebuild, and one many had pegged to finish the season at the very bottom of the NHL standings.
This is astonishing. This is worthy of a Neil deGrasse Tyson investigation or a Netflix miniseries.
And the worst part is, these Pens don’t always give you the sense they’re a second-tier Stanley Cup contender. There have been games this year where they’ve danced all over their opponents with purpose and glee. From mid-October through the first week of November, they won eight of 10, including victories over Florida, Nashville and Washington. They won four straight at the end of January, some seven weeks after their inconsistent performance cost head coach Mike Johnston his job. They tease you that they’re starting to figure things out.
But by-and-large, the Penguins win a game or two in a row, then lose two or three. They beat a strong squad like the Rangers one night, and follow it up by laying an egg against the lowly Calgary Flames. For the most part, they do well at handling opponents you think they should handle, and for the most part, they lose to teams ahead of them in the standings. And this is why – given the league’s playoff system that pits divisional rivals against each other in the early rounds – not too many people will be picking them to win two or three rounds this spring, let alone a championship.
Again, all this mediocrity is coming from an organization that possesses pieces other GMs would kill to possess. This is coming with Crosby and Malkin producing offense at a point-per-game pace. This is happening with Letang averaging more than 26 minutes a game and amassing 51 points in 56 games. This is taking place with Fleury operating with slightly better individual statistics than he did in a more-than-solid 2014-15 campaign.
Unfortunately for Pens fans, there’s not enough good news to go around after you finish talking about the franchise’s cornerstones. Indeed, if the Chicago Blackhawks are the modern-day model organization when it comes to staying in Cup contention year-in-and-year-out with an incredible talent core, the Penguins are looking more and more like a cautionary tale.
Unlike the Hawks, Pittsburgh hasn’t developed enough young and cheap talent to ease the strain on their salary cap situation. The Pens have prospects worth hanging on to, but the reason their management spends almost every summer making trades to address a lack of depth on the wings and on defense is because they’re not getting enough assistance from the development system.
And unlike the trades the Hawks have made to help them navigate the treacherous cap world, the Penguins’ deals haven’t regularly acted in a buoyant fashion. Chicago has moved out Brandon Saad and Patrick Sharp, among others, but they’ve brought in Artem Anisimov and repatriated Andrew Ladd for the rest of this season, and made a minimal impact on their payroll in both cases. In Phil Kessel and Carl Hagelin, Pittsburgh has added two players in the last year alone who account for $10.8 million in cap space and who are contracted at least through the summer of 2019.
Small wonder, then, that Pittsburgh’s future looks comparatively bleak.
Of course, as you’d say of probably 15-20 NHL teams, there’s still a chance they can get their act together in these final 16 games, peak at the right time, avoid the injury bug and go on a lengthy post-season run to surprise everyone. But that’s the entire point – a team with Crosby, Malkin, Fleury and Letang ought not to be considered a surprise Cup-winner. The Pens should be making the most of their stars’ prime years, not fumbling around, lunging for complimentary components and trying in vain just to produce a consistent effort.
But that’s where the Penguins are today. Their high-end talent is an oasis that gives their fans hope, but that also masks the desert that surrounds it. Some of their parts are astonishing, but the sum of their parts are anything but.
They’re the Tidal of the NHL, and if you’re not feeling like putting your money behind them when the playoffs arrive – and that’s even if they’re in the playoffs – it’s perfectly understandable why you'd arrive at that conclusion.
Blogger •NHL Columnist • 
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