When the Pittsburgh Penguins drafted the latest phenomenon in Canada’s golden hockey chain that stretches back to Howie Morenz, Newsy Lalonde, and Cyclone Taylor in Sidney Crosby, and then followed it up by selecting maybe the second-best player currently playing in the league, Evgeni Malkin, fans did not talk about the Penguins future Stanley Cup Championship; they talked about futures Stanley Cup Championships.
When in 2009, the promise came true, all Penguins fans believed that a second golden era, since the heyday of Mario Lemieux had begun.
What Happened to the Pittsburgh Penguins Future?
Half-way through that 2008-09 season, the Penguins fired head coach Michel Therrien (now coach of the Montreal Canadiens) and replaced him with Dan Bylsma who took the team to the top.
General Manager Ray Shero was considered one of the best executives in the NHL Everything was coming together as had been predicted.
Today both Shero and Bylsma are gone and the “certain championships” that everyone expected are doubtful. In fact the horrible thought has raised its ugly head that Crosby and Malkin may never win another Stanley Cup in Pittsburgh.
Since winning the Stanley Cup the Penguins have been eliminated in the playoffs by five lower-seeded teams: Montreal, Tampa Bay, Philadelphia, Boston, and the New York Rangers, teams that at least on paper seemed inferior to the Penguins.
Still worse, it seems that with each defeat, the Penguins are getting worse, not better.
Part of the problem has been goaltending. Particularly against Philadelphia, Marc-Andre Fleury has played at a horrible level, seldom seen by an NHL playoff goaltender. Even the best of teams cannot make up for bad goaltending, not getting the crucial save when it needs to be made.
But even the explanation of bad goaltending is not enough. It is bewildering to understand what has happened in Pittsburgh.
Over the years, this writer has classified NHL hockey teams in four categories:
4: Bad teams that have little talent and play badly.
3: Talented teams that should do well in the playoffs and be a consistent Stanley Cup contender, but are not because they are lazy, do not want to pay the price, and usually play badly on team defense.
2: Teams with little talent but do better than they should because they work hard, play good team defense and have good coaching.
1: Talented teams that play hard, have good coaching, and play up to their potential.
Using this chart, it seems that the Penguins have fallen from group 1 to group 3.
How this has happened is anyone’s guess. Bylsma was seen as a bright young coach who led the club to win the big one, but somehow the Penguins got softer as his tenure continued.
Maybe after winning the Stanley Cup, the players started to believe that they could win the championship again on sheer talent alone without having to work hard at all.
If that is the case, that makes them the prey of “inferior” teams that belong in category 2, never mind talented teams that go all out.
Is it the work ethic, coupled with bad goaltending that has brought the Penguins so low? If this is the case, the Penguins need a coach like Vince Lombardi to straighten them out.
Lombardi had a masterful gift of knowing the spiritual state of a team. He weeded out players who would not play all out and replaced them with “winners”. The result was five NFL championships.
Right now the Penguins can be best compared to the 1960s Chicago Blackhawks.
Like the Penguins, the Blackhawks had supposedly the best two players of the decade, Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita. But history shows that Hull and Mikita only won one Stanley Cup and that was an upset in 1961.
By 1969, the Blackhawks shockingly failed to even make the playoffs. They had become a goal-hungry team that played defense poorly.
They had lots of great individual statistics. For the past few years, Hull had been setting new NHL goal scoring records. But championships never came.
Montreal and Toronto won the rest of the Cups during the 1960s. It is the best team, not the team with the best players who win championships.
Are the current Penguins destined for a similar fate? They are no longer the automatic favorite to win the Stanley Cup.
While Crosby and Malkin are still in the prime of their careers, there is no need to panic yet. But the pressure in the playoffs is going to keep mounting if the Penguins continue to go out so meekly.
They have to get good goaltending and spiritually they have to “show something”.
The golden future that everyone once thought belonged to Pittsburgh now belongs to the Chicago Blackhawks and Los Angeles Kings.
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