The bad news is, not sucking means Jimmy R won't be able to "fix his mistake" and trade the guy. The Penguins will be saddled with $4 million of future suck on their bottom pairing that doesn't move the needle either way when someone at not even half the cost could come in and suck just as much. If you're interested in becoming educated, in the past I've called this poor asset management. Gudbranson won't help the transition game the Penguins so sorely missed against the Islanders this playoff season. He won't provide scoring from the backside the Penguins haven't had for seasons now. Hell, Jamie Oleksiak had a brief jump from "sucks dick" to "kinda sucks dick" for about 20 games after the initial Dallas trade. We saw how that scenario played out. I don't know how many D men 22-year-old Pettersson will have to drag along the ice next season. Hopefully it's zero.
I didn't have the Penguins pegged to make the playoffs after the Gudbranson trade, but thanks to Matt Murray having a hell of a couple months and Crosby beasting his way to 100 points, it was made a reality. Unfortunately, the team was exposed for what they were...and disposed of very quickly by the Islanders. Were the Penguins even in the playoffs for a week?
As it stands now, the two worst "starters" on the Penguins defense are making $7.5 million against the cap. If how the playoffs began is any indication, one of those guys (Jack Johnson) might even be in the press box. Yikes. Of course, Jack Johnson was the big addition from Jimmy R's Summer of Suck, Vol. 2.
How do you turn a perennial Stanley Cup contender into a paper tiger? Ladies and Gents, I present the beginning of Jimmy R's Summer of Suck, Vol. 3.
You do things like this. I bet buddies of mine that the salaries of Phil Kessel, Sheary, and Maatta this offseason will more or less turn into Jack Johnson, Erik Gudbranson, and the raise for Jake Guentzel. Whelp, here we are in this terrible, terrible world. With the recent trade rumor today from Josh Yohe, it's looking mighty like Phil Kessel's trade value will be sunk in a salary dump of Jack Johnson. Remember when Jimmy R. made fun of the Columbus Blue Jackets for benching Jacky Boi to start the playoffs last season? Whoops! Remember when Jimmy R. TRIPLED DOWN on Johnson and told the fans to stop making fun of him? Haha!
I think it's the point now where you can call Phil Kessel a problem. He produced on the power play, but the combination of a Johnson pairing plus "Bad Malkin" made it way too obvious that Phil is nonexistent and not a commodity defensively for this team. Phil is such a value capwise at this point, so the team has to get value for their most valuable trade piece. It's really looking like they aren't. In the best case scenario, the Penguins find teams to dump both Gudbranson and Johnson. Because of how much better Gudbranson played, they may even get positive value in that deal.
The worst thing the Penguins can do is package either with Kessel. The best they can do is drop at least half of Kessel's salary in a deal.
The second line was a nonfactor for the majority of the season and in the playoffs. If the first line gets shut down, as it did, the second line has to pick up the slack.
Don't get me wrong. No Phil and no Johnson probably reduces the Penguins Goals Against by about 25. That's if I'm being generous. But the proposed deal of Kessel and Johnson is such a horrific downgrade of talent. Rask carries his own issues with a higher price tag per season than Johnson. Zucker is certainly speedy and fits the mold of this team, but is Kessel only really worth a downgrade in 40 points per season and a swap of bad players with little to no cap relief?
As always, I'm a year (or two) ahead of the local and national media on what is right (and wrong) with the Penguins. This national article reads eerily similar to a thread I made that some deemed "chicken little" at the time.
https://nhl.nbcsports.com/2019/04/17/penguins-playoff-exit-was-two-years-in-the-making/
The Pittsburgh Penguins loss to the New York Islanders was no fluke.
It was a result they earned and was due to them being outplayed and soundly beaten in pretty much every phase of the game by a Islanders team that looked faster, crisper, and smoother.
It was also not the result of something that simply happened overnight.
When you lose your identity, teams with one tend to smash your face into the ice.
On the off day between their losses in Games 3 and 4, defender Justin Schultz nailed a big part of the problem when he said this: “Our identity has changed over the years. We play fast and get the puck up quick. That’s what we do best. We haven’t done that this series.”
Oh wow! Justin with the hard hitting analysis. Where have I heard something like that?
From 2010 to 2016, the Pittsburgh Penguins lacked a team identity. That changed when Sullivan took the helm. The team was built on skill and speed throughout the lineup. It showed success. The team won back-to-back Stanley Cups with guys like Bryan Rust, Jake Guentzel, Tom Kuhnackl, and Conor Sheary.
--Hacksaw Jim Duggan
Woo doggy.
Rutherford is a highly flawed general manager. Mike Sullivan is falling into the trap that every single coach does after some level of success.
The amount of terrible errors and in-the-moment thinking that Rutherford has done over the last two seasons have maybe closed the window on the Malkin/Crosby era. Let's review.
Rutherford has shown his inability to understand what made his team successful in its two SC runs: quick puck movement (speed/forecheck) and 4 lines that can score.
The Ryan Reaves trade sacrificed a roster spot, a decent C prospect when the team was set to go with Greg McKegg a 3C to start the season, and 20 spots in the draft. We all know how that turned out. This was a universally panned move when it happened.
-- Hacksaw Jim Duggan
Back to the article...
In the years between their 2009 and 2016 championships the Penguins had become a deeply flawed team that was short on depth around its superstars and had rapidly developed a tendency to unravel whenever things didn’t go their way. They were almost like petulant children that would lose their composure when calls went against them and become almost infatuated with responding to even the slightest physical altercation. They reached rock bottom in this regard during the 2012 and 2013 postseason losses to the Philadelphia Flyers and Boston Bruins when they seemed to be playing a game where hits and responses were worth more than goals.
Oh man. It's like this guy reads my posts.
The day before the 2017 Stanley Cup Final began, Rutherford offered a look into where the team was going to be headed when he sounded off in an interview with Ken Campbell of The Hockey News. This is the key part:
“I hear year after year how the league and everyone loves how the Penguins play,” said Penguins GM Jim Rutherford. “‘They play pure hockey and they skate.’ Well, now it’s going to have to change and I feel bad about it, but it’s the only way we can do it. We’re going to have to get one or two guys…and some of these games that should be just good hockey games will turn into a sh—show. We’ll go right back to where we were in the ’70s and it’s really a shame.”
Emphasis added.
“We’re going to have to get one or two guys.”
He doubled down on it just days after the team won the Stanley Cup.
“We are going to try to add a player or two that maybe we can have more protection in our lineup. That’s not that easy because [coach Mike Sullivan] likes to roll four lines and you’ve got to plug a guy in that can play on a regular basis, but hopefully that’s what we can do.”
Lol! This guy DOES read my posts.
On draft night that year, the Penguins flipped their first-round pick and center Oskar Sundqvist to the St. Louis Blues for Ryan Reaves and a second-round pick, a trade that has turned out to be a significant loss for the Penguins in more ways than one, and it was a bad idea from the start. Not only did they move back 20 spots in the draft, but Sundqvist has turned into a solid third-line center for the Blues (a position the Penguins spent two years and countless assets trying to fill) while Reaves clearly never fit in with the Penguins’ style of play.
Sullivan barely used him, it shortened the team’s bench, and he was ultimately traded halfway through the season in the massive and complicated deal for Derick Brassard.
The problem with that sequence wasn’t necessarily the trade itself, but what it represented.
Super Genius. Clap. Clap. Clap Clap Clap.
Oskar Sundqvist. Hmm. How is that going?
Let me check who is in the Stanley Cup Finals.
Oh!
And how is that guy doing??
Oh, me. That 4th line piece of shit had 4 goals (1 GW) and 4 assists and is in the top-5 in +/- for the playoffs. He's also averaging 15:59 mins of ice time per game.
But I see he's only at 44% faceoffs
Useless!Let's get back to the article from NBC that harps on the same points I made two years ago...
What it represented was a philosophical shift from the recipe that worked, and there is nothing that has happened since that trade that has put them back on track.
No way, dude!
Pretty much every significant roster move the Penguins have made since then (and there have been A LOT of them) has revolved around getting bigger, stronger players, especially on the blue line where Jamie Oleksiak, Jack Johnson, Erik Gudbranson were the significant additions over the past year. It resulted in a defense that lacks mobility, doesn’t move the puck well, and has simply zapped them of a lot of their transition game. Add that to the departures of forwards like Carl Hagelin and Conor Sheary and the team no longer has the speed and skating advantage that it used to have over its opponents.
But this board told me we need tuff guyz.
The most confusing thing about all of it is the roster construction and many of the moves seem — emphasis on seem — to be at odds with the way the coach has wanted the team to play from the day he arrived behind the bench. I know nothing of the working relationship between Rutherford and Sullivan and whether they remain on the same page as to how the team is built, but the optics of it all just seem strange.
They paid a significant price for Reaves, and the coach didn’t play him. The general manager championed the signing of Johnson all season, and despite playing in all 82 regular season games was deemed to be not worth a roster spot in the first game of the playoffs. A team that wants to play fast and beat teams in transition and with puck possession, suddenly has an inconsistent transition and possession game because the players on the back end can’t make the necessary plays to feed it. And that doesn’t even get into general manager’s fascination with trying to even the score with Wilson in Washington after he knocked Zach Astron-Reese out of the playoffs a year ago (something that ended up getting Oleksiak injured).
What is not understandable and defensible is willingly taking yourself away from something that worked. That is what the Penguins did, and it is a big part of why their season ended up going the way it did.
The moves they make this summer will tell us a lot as to what they learned from it.
Let's repeat that last line again.
The moves they make this summer will tell us a lot as to what they learned from it.
Kessel and Johnson for Zucker and Rask?
Yiikkkesssss..
