PITTSBURGH — Pretty much everything we have heard from the Penguins’ front office and coaching staff since the team was ceremoniously bounced from the playoffs by the Islanders is a version of “all is well, nothing to see here.”
The Penguins have lost four consecutive playoff series now, and yet, we are told that the core is good enough, the roster is good enough, the goalie is good enough and the head coaches system still works. These aren’t my words, by the way, these are the words of Penguins general manager Ron Hextall and company.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, and it seems like the Penguins are at that point. The Penguins — unless the front office and coaching staff have incredible poker faces — are not going to look much different next season than they did this season, or last season, or the season before ...
“We see a future with this core. These guys have been here a long time,” Hextall said during his postseason press conference, which took place virtually. “We had a good year. It certainly didn’t give me pause to think about what we should do with this core. … I expect to have these guys back next year, for sure.”
I get it, this core group of Penguins won Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017, and they did so using Mike Sullivan’s speed-based system. They were fast and skilled, and they were able to skate circles around a lot of the bigger, heavier teams trying to slow them down.
It seemed like that was going to be the trend as many other teams tried to get faster and for a short period it seemed like the game was headed that way. But then a funny thing happened — the St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup in 2019 with a big, heavy, team built on great goaltending. The Blues were physical, they controlled teams with their physicality and that was a winning formula.
The pendulum has seemingly swung back in that direction, and while teams still value speed, they also value size and physicality. Jesse Granger of The Athletic wrote an excellent story looking at the size of the teams in the NHL, and the conclusions are not surprising: The teams still playing are all big, heavy teams.
According to Granger, the three heaviest teams are, in order, Las Vegas, Tampa and the New York Islanders. Montreal, which is the fourth team in the Final Four, is ranked as the seventh heaviest team. The Penguins are the second lightest team in the league.
I know Sullivan said, “We didn’t lose because of our size,” and he may be right — to a point. But it is hard to argue that point any more given the way games in the playoffs are officiated and given how the games are played. The Penguins lost THIS YEAR mostly because their goalie, Tristan Jarry, wasn’t good enough. If this year happened in a vacuum, then OK, it would be just a down year. But the Penguins have now lost 15 of their last 19 playoff games, and Jarry didn’t play many of those games.
The problems go deeper than the goalie, that much is clear. The Penguins have gotten pushed around, they have gotten interfered with and they have gotten clutched and grabbed. They just don’t have enough size and enough physicality to do much about it. Granger asks if the NHL is trending that way, and I would say the answer is yes.
I’m not saying they need to go out and try to become the old Broad Street Bullies Flyers teams or try and sign a bunch of goons. I think their speed and skill should always be their greatest asset, but they need to break up the band a little bit and get some size.
They need a physical presence in front of their opponent’s goal, they need to be able to move people out of in front of their goal and they need to be able to, um, send a message when other teams take liberties with their stars.
They aren’t built to do those things, and the Islanders took advantage of that and the fact that the games are called much looser in the playoffs to bully the Penguins. Quite simply, the Penguins no longer look like a team built to win in the playoffs because they aren’t.
And I might add one other thing to this discussion: All four teams have experienced and highly successful goalies. Marc-Andre Fleury, Carey Price, Semyon Varlamov and Andrei Vasilevskiy have all either won a Vezina or been a finalist for it. The Penguins have Jarry, who isn’t in the class of any of those or four or most every other goalie in the playoffs.
The Penguins are a speed-based team that doesn’t have a lot of size and doesn’t have a top-level goalie. The teams that are still playing are all heavy teams playing in front of elite goalies. Something has to change for the Penguins and probably dramatically, or they will be one-and-done in the playoffs again next year.
