Reviewing your Penguins coordinates, you'll note we're two months from the glorious NHL playoffs, a little more than two weeks away from the rumors riot called the trade deadline, and about 120 days from the Stanley Cup championship parade that won't happen in Pittsburgh.
Oh, you're just hearing this now?
Nobody wins consecutive Stanley Cup titles anymore. That is so 1990s. Last time it happened, Bill Clinton was trying to get the puck away from Monica Lewinsky in the defensive zone and people were absent-mindedly humming Chumbawamba songs and thinking, "God I gotta stop this."
Furthermore, every time the Penguins have won a Stanley Cup, they were fueled by at least one critical trade at or near the deadline, and that's probably not going to happen, either.
About the only card upper management can play right now to alter the hockey team's evident destiny is to fire head coach Mike Sullivan, because he has way too much experience behind the Penguins bench. Mario Lemiuex and Company has to know this franchise only wins the Cup with a new coach, right? Bob Johnson, Scotty Bowman, Dan Bylsma, and Sullivan all drank from Lord Stanley's goblet after 80 regular-season games or fewer behind the Penguins bench. Bylsma had only 25. Sullivan, who had 54 last year, already has 108. He's doomed.
Fortunately, this is not the way general manager Jim Rutherford interprets the landscape for this current raft of Penguins. His analysis is slightly more sophisticated.
"I spend a lot of time in there," Rutherford said, nodding toward the dressing room as the Penguins were packing to head West this week. "I'm around the team all the time. I travel with the team. Some (GMs) travel half the time. Some don't travel much at all. I like to be on top of things. I don't even talk much. I'm just around and hear them talk, and I observe. I can pick out guys that like to play with each other and maybe there are guys that like to play with somebody else. Maybe guys that aren't in the same mood in a given week and does that need to be addressed _ are there personal issues _ things like that. Those are things that if you stay on top of and take care of them in a quiet way, then it doesn't get out of hand.
"But I observe a team here that believes it can win and believes in each other and enjoys playin' with each other."
Rutherford enjoys that aspect of his job like few others, and he knows it's taken most of half a century in the game to learn how to interpret what we like to call chemistry but is much closer to what the clinicians might better describe as intragroup psychological dynamics. He knows there's more to taking your team's temperature than walking in there and whipping out your Exergen temporal scanner thermometer. And here is what else he knows: No matter how good he feels about this team's immeasurables, the 21st century NHL makes back-to-back championships pretty close to impossible.
The previous coach to do it (and do it, and do it, and do it, and do it again), talked about these modern problems on the phone from Sarasota, Fla., this week.
"The better you do, it's hard to keep all the players now," said Bowman, who coached the 1992 Penguins, the 1977, '78, and '79 Montreal Canadiens, and the 1998 Detroit Red Wings, the most-recent team to go back-to-back. "The Penguins last year, a lot of their guys that came through were new. The goalie (Matt Murray), (Conor) Sheary, (Bryan) Rust and the younger guys, then when Mike Sullivan came up (from Wilkes-Barre), he had firsthand knowledge of the guys he brought with him. That's what helped them. The new guys were really fast and they played a really strong checking game throughout the playoffs."
When Sullivan was through fielding congratulatory phone calls last summer, meaning like August, the head coach knew there was one phone call he would have to make if he was going to find a path forward from champion of the world.
"He was the last guy to do it!" Sullivan said when I brought up the name Scotty Bowman. "I spent a year with the Blackhawks and when I worked there, they asked me to sit in on the scouting meetings and he was sitting in on all those. So I ended up spending a lot of time with him, in the meetings, going to dinner. I established a relationship with him and we hit it off. I enjoy his company. He's such an insightful guy, so after we won the Cup this past year, I put a call into him at the end of the summer just too kind of pick his brain. I asked him if he wouldn't mind sharing some of his insights, you know, on what my potential challenges would be. Try to learn through his experience. He was very gracious. We had close to an hour's conversation."
I'm pretty sure Bowman told him that winning the Cup sparks a singular euphoria that has potentially serious side effects, among them moderate to severe myopia.
"The toughest part of repeating is that the first win is always so huge _ when you win that Cup, the allegiance to the players is paramount, (because) you've been through a lot together," Bowman said. "The toughest thing you have to do when you win is to make a change. It's always good if you can add two or three new players to a team."
The Penguins were blessed that Bowman and then-Penguins GM Craig Patrick had come to understand this long before the winter of 1992, when, eight months removed from winning the franchise's first Cup, they dealt Paul Coffey to the Kings for Brian Benning and Jeff Chychrun, and that very day sent Benning on to Philadelphia with Mark Recchi for Kjell Samuelsson, Rick Tocchet and Ken Wregget.
Coffey and Recchi, who had helped Lemieux do the impossible in bringing the Cup to Pittsburgh, no longer Penguins? Ex-squeeze me?
"You can't do that now," Bowman said. "With all the money involved it would be pretty tough, with the dynamics involved with a team that's in contention, to make a trade like that. To get players as good as the Penguins have _ Crosby and Malkin _ I mean if you've got stars you've gotta keep them. They are long contracts and you're locked in. That's why the cap has meant movement for a lot of good players, and that's the biggest change in the last 15 or 20 years _ you're not contending with the same three or four true contenders, and young guys coming in are ready to play."
Thus the primary reason no one repeats as champion anymore can be said to be parity. Since the Red Wings won consecutive Cups in 1997 and 1998, 11 different franchises have won at least once. Over that span, only three defending champions have even reached the final. Two didn't make the playoffs at all, and six others were eliminated in the conference quarterfinals. In Bowman's Montreal heyday, it was rare that more than two or three of the NHL's 16 other teams could be said to be legitimate Cup challengers.
Today, most NHL students can name 10 viable Cup candidates yearning for the playoffs, or more.
"I always say 16," Rutherford said. "Once you get in there, anybody can get hot, and off we go."
In his first two seasons running the Penguins, Rutherford has only polished his wheeler-dealer bona fides _ sending draft picks and middle valued entities to bring Justin Schultz, Carl Hagelin, Trevor Daley, Nick Bonino, Phil Kessel, Ian Cole, Ben Lovejoy (since lost to free agency) and Patric Hornqvist. But today Rutherford insists he is not fighting his own transactional urges against a greater prudence.
"Not at all," said the NHL general manager of the year. "Quite the opposite. I don't feel I have to do anything. I don't feel as much pressure as I did a year ago to change things. I'm gonna be in the mix for the next few weeks, listening to what's going on out there. If we can add another experienced defense, that would be something I'd consider."
Add to your growing list of things that probably won't happen then the subtraction of Marc-Andre Fleury. The goalie market is soft to begin with, overcrowded by the presumed availability of Tampa Bay's Ben Bishop, who is two years younger than Fleury, and Fleury's cap hit, $5.75 million, is prohibitive.
Moreover, I don't get the sense Rutherford wants to find out how the removal of Fleury impacts the chemistry with which he's so pleased.
"I don't know if you could find a better pro in all of sports than Marc-Andre Fleury," Rutherford said. "But at the end of the day he's a guy that wants to play and right now he's not playin' as much. The side that's more complicated is that this is a unique year because we have an expansion draft. We have a cap that we have to watch. We don't want to be caught in a position like some other teams, where you have to end up trading away younger players away sooner than you want to."
And if Fleury gets traded and Murray gets hurt?
"I think Pittsburgh wants to keep Fleury," Bowman said. "That's not a position you can take a gamble on. It's the most important position on the team."
When Rutherford and Sullivan talk, as they do every day, and when they meet with their hockey operations staff, their clear priority is to repeat. All issues and all questions are evaluated on what gives the Penguins the best chance to do that. Recent history says otherwise, but if they are careful, careful and very lucky, maybe Scotty Bowman will wake up in Florida one day this summer as someone other than the last guy to coach back-to-back Stanley Cup champions.
