So many problems, so little solutions
It was a quote after Friday night’s 4-0 shellacking at the hands of the Edmonton Oilers that fits the Penguins still after a second period collapse last night cost them in Vancouver.
“It’s concerning because we’re just not good enough right now,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said late Friday night. “We didn’t play hard enough. We didn’t play together as a group. We weren’t good enough.”
Whenever a NHL coach is admitting that effort and togetherness is a repeated issue, the end is almost certainly near for his stint in charge. It’s almost as if there’s a white flag raised with a lack of answers on how to fix it, and a stunned disbelief of how things have unraveled to get to the way it is.
That, of course, is a pretty drastic outlook and it might be unfair to characterize Sullivan as a totally defeated figure at this point. (He sure looks like it during game nights these days though). The team’s effort wasn’t a problem last night, so much as the hole they quickly dug themselves in the second period.
But come home like the Penguins will today, win a few games against not exactly a murder’s row of opponents in the next week (Minnesota, off to a 5-1-2 start is a good team but Anaheim and Montreal are ripe for the picking) and that wouldn’t fix all the problems but it sure will help morale within the team will improve and make the optics look better.
Also, whenever you think about Sullivan’s job status or what could/should happen with him, keep in mind that just a couple of weeks ago Tom Werner, the chairman of Fenway Sports Group, was glowing in his praise of Sullivan on opening night.
“We think that he’s one of the two or three best coaches in hockey,” Werner said.
Does management and ownership move to remove a coach they consider one of the top at his job? By their own definition, they would be replacing him with certainly not one of the best coaches in hockey. The Penguins have a lot of hockey and the unfortunate reality is that the guys in suits behind the bench are only a fraction of it.
It’s the delicate balance to be solved. Do the Penguins take drastic action?
What needs to be fixed starts at the top. The Sidney Crosby line has some of the worst defensive inputs in the whole league right now.
not ideal pic.twitter.com/hRHyfCAv3a
— JFresh (@JFreshHockey) October 26, 2024
Despite looking good on expected goals for, Bryan Rust doesn’t has one even strength goal this season (from last night, when he was moved to play with Evgeni Malkin). He’s also now injured, of an unknown severity. Crosby has no 5v5 goals himself. The Jake Guentzel-sized hole in the Pens’ lineup for a skilled winger to play with Crosby is absolutely massive and causing immense pain for this team.
Last season the Pens got off to a 3-6-0 start and they were never able to dig out of it. They nearly held a mirror up to that with a 3-5-1 in their first nine games before losing again last night to sink a little further.
The problem is obvious; the defense stinks on toast. Pittsburgh’s giving up 4.3 goals per game, second worst in the NHL to Philadelphia’s 4.5 rate (ahh, the smallest of silver linings). The amount of slot shots and high danger shots the Pens surrender has been unsustainably awful, yet they continue to pop up every game. No team can compete when they’re getting gashed and when their personnel is not sufficient in that regard. That reflects on the defensemen, but also the forwards who are turning the puck over at inopportune places and doing little to slow rushes against them.
The question is now, how do they address it? An issue is there is no easy answer. Changing players around is a pure example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, that alone is not going to address the issue. Tactically and strategically the team isn’t sharp but despite trying different combinations better performances haven’t been seen. It can get late mighty early in the NHL world and alarm bells have to be going off right now for the Penguins as a team in serious jeopardy for how they have been built this year and how they are playing.
The Penguins will have a long flight back from Vancouver, and at some level from management to coaching to the players they will need someone to step up to provide some answers soon before another season slips away.