2024-25 NHL team preview: Pittsburgh Penguins

Credit: Sidney Crosby (© Brett Holmes-USA TODAY Sports)

LAST SEASON

After failing to qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs in 2022-23 for the first time since 2005-06, a stretch of 17 years, the Pittsburgh Penguins went into last season rejuvenated and refocused, hoping to give longtime franchise cornerstones Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin another shot at postseason hockey.

The club fired their hockey operations staff then hired former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas as their president of hockey ops. Two weeks after the Vegas Golden Knights won their first Stanley Cup in franchise history, Pittsburgh traded for forward Reilly Smith in hopes of rekindling some of that playoff magic. In August, Dubas acquired reigning Norris Trophy winner Erik Karlsson from the San Jose Sharks in a three-way deal that saw the Penguins give up their 2024 first-round pick, a 2025 second-round pick and a slew of players.

When you have future Hall of Famers like Crosby and Malkin who are well into the back nine of their careers, along with an elite talent like Jake Guentzel going into the last year of his contract before unrestricted free agency, you feel inclined to take risks, hoping to light the tinderbox and catch a flame that rides hot into the playoffs. If you’re lucky, you keep playing hockey after the kids are out of school.

Unfortunately for the Penguins, that flame was snuffed out early in the season, with the club going 3-6-0 through October, losing to future basement-dwelling teams like the Ottawa Senators and Anaheim Ducks. Even with a combined record of 15-7-4 in November and December, the poor start kept the Penguins in seventh place in the Metropolitan Division on Jan. 1, While they were still technically in the race for the final Wildcard spot in the Eastern Conference, Pittsburgh was never to be confused with a team that would contend in the playoffs, let alone one that had the merit to play in them.

The team would end up trading Guentzel to the Carolina Hurricanes for a first-round pick and Michael Bunting, and despite a late run that saw Crosby play some of his best hockey — he scored 10 goals and 20 assists for 30 points in the final 18 games — the Penguins failed to qualify for the second consecutive season, finishing with a 38-32-12 record and 88 points, fifth in the Metropolitan and three points shy of the second Wildcard spot in the East.

KEY ADDITIONS AND DEPARTURES

Additions

Cody Glass, C
Rutger McGroarty, LW
Matt Gezelcyk, D
Blake Lizottte, LW
Anthony Beauvillier, LW
Kevin Hayes, C
Bokondji Imama, LW
Mac Hollowell, D
Sebastian Aho, D

Departures

Jeff Carter, C (retired)
Reilly Smith, RW (NYR)
Jordan Frasca, C (NSH)
Radim Zohorna, LW (Switzerland)
Maxim Cajkovic, RW (Czechia)

OFFENSE

If you take a look at the Penguins’ 2023-24 HockeyDB page, you’ll see Crosby at the top with 42 goals and 52 assists for 94 points, leading in all three categories. No surprise when you consider just how prolific the 2005 No. 1 overall pick has been through the first 19 years of his career.

But when you look past Crosby, there’s an initial shock of just how far behind the next closest scorer is. The 38-year-old Malkin scored 67 points in 2023-24, nothing to sneeze at, but three of his four lowest point-per-game (PPG) totals have been in the last four seasons, with a career-low 0.82 PPG coming last season. Expect that number to further decrease in 2024-25.

Beyond Bryan Rust and his 56 points, there isn’t much to work with in the forward corp. Yes, Bunting recorded 19 points in 21 games after the trade, finishing the season with 55 total, and he’ll likely get some ice time with Crosby over the course of the upcoming season. But what are you expecting from depth pieces like Kevin Hayes, Cody Glass and Lars Eller? I like Drew O’Connor as much as the next guy (Shoutout Dartmouth College!), and Noel Acciari can be a hit machine on the forecheck, but for a team that finished 18th in goals for last season, how are you going to improve on that with an arguably worse lineup?

Maybe rookie Rutger McGroarty could shine bright (more on his later), but it’s slim pickings up front. Karlsson and Kris Letang were two of Pittsburgh’s most productive players last season, but as they enter their 34- and 37-year-old seasons, respectively, just how much offense are you expecting on your back end?

DEFENSE

Speaking of Karlsson and Letang, the Penguins’ blueline was able to produce offensively, but defensively, it was average, at best. Karlsson took a major step back from the 101 points he produced in 2022-23 with the Sharks, but his 56 last season was still fourth on the team among all skaters.

Letang wasn’t far behind with 51, and he seemed to thrive with Karlsson getting all the attention. Both players finished with even-strength Corsi totals of over 50 percent, and they both were surprisingly healthy, playing all 82 regular-season games.

Marcus Pettersson has one year remaining on his five-year, $20.13 million deal, and you can bet he’ll get a sizeable raise next summer, whether it’s with Pittsburgh or somewhere else. He averaged 22:40 of ice time in 2023-24, scoring a career high 30 points, and finished with an even-strength Corsi of 51.6 percent. Ryan Graves is entering the second season of a six-year deal, and the 6-foot-6 defender should continue to provide a physical presence while providing reliable defensive play, opening things up for whichever offensive dynamo head coach Mike Sullivan puts beside him.

While there’s pieces on Pittsburgh’s blueline to like, the unfortunate reality is that Karlsson and Letang are near the end of their injury-prone careers, and losing one or both of them would torpedo the Penguins’ season. For all the talent the two possess, their availability may be their best ability.

GOALTENDING

According to Hockey Reference, the league average for save percentage (SV%) in 2023-24 was .903. The Penguins’ two primary netminders last season, Tristan Jarry and Alex Nedeljkovic, had save percentages of .903 and .902, respectively. You couldn’t get more average goaltending if you tried.

I’ve been a fan of Jarry since he became a full-time NHLer in 2019-20, posting a 20-12-1 record with a .921 SV% and an even-strength SV% of .928. His best season came in 2021-22 when he went 34-18-6 with a .919 SV% and it felt like he would backstop the Penguins to a deep playoff run. But injuries and inconsistent play have stunted what could be the trajectory of a top goalie in this league, and now some fans wonder if it was a mistake signing Jarry to a five-year, $26.9 million contract.

As for Nedeljkovic, that all-world performance for Carolina in his rookie season that made him a Calder Trophy finalist, subsequent trade to the Detroit Red Wings and a two-year deal worth $6 million seems long gone. He performed adequately in 38 appearances last season, posting an 18-7-7 record and a 2.97 GAA, The club re-signed him on a two-year extension worth $2.5 million per season, so expect him to get a fair amount of starts through the year, especially if Jarry shows signs of struggling.

COACHING

Since Sullivan joined the Penguins midway through the 2015-16 season, he’s been one of the NHL’s most successful coaches, winning back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017, combined with seven playoff appearances and a 375-219-77 record, a points percentage of .616. Sullivan signed a three-year extension after the 2021-22 season that didn’t kick in until the start of this season, and he’ll remain under contract until 2026-27.

But after their second championship in 2017, Pittsburgh has just one playoff series win, a first-round win over the Philadelphia Flyers in 2018, and have lost five consecutive series since then, four of which were in the first round. Now having missed the playoffs two years in a row, some are wondering if Sullivan has squeezed all the juice he can out of the Penguins.

When it came to special teams, the Penguins’ power play was one of the worst in the league last season, finishing 30th with a success rate of 15.3 per cent. It’s no coincidence that nearly all the teams that made it to the 2024 post-season finished in the top half of the league in power-play percentages, and for a team that had Crosby, Malkin, Karlsson, Letang and for most of the season Guentzel, that’s unacceptable.

The best coaches in the game learn to adapt, evolve, get the most out of their players. If Sullivan and the Penguins get off to another horrid start, Dubas and Co. may be left with no choice but to move on, contract extension be damned.

ROOKIES

I said earlier I would bring up McGroarty again, so here it is: he’s damn good and will make this club out of training camp. The 20-year-old was an absolute force during his two seasons at the University of Michigan, scoring 34 goals and 57 assists for 91 points, including 52 points in 36 games last season.

This is what Daily Faceoff’s Steven Ellis wrote about McGroarty last month:

“Let me put this out in the air right now: let McGroarty start the season with Sidney Crosby. The winger’s ability to score, hit and outwork opponents makes him so intriguing, and I fully believe he’d be an excellent addition up front.”

The other player to keep an eye on in 2024-25 is Vasily Ponomarev, one of the assets acquired in the Guentzel trade. A 2020 second-round pick, Ponomarev had 30 points in 45 AHL games last season, and the year prior finished with 24 goals and 46 points with the AHL’s Chicago Wolves. He’s able to navigate his lack of size in the offensive zone and could be a useful depth piece for a Penguins’ lineup that’s desperate for offense in their bottom-six.

BURNING QUESTIONS

1. Will Mike Sullivan finish the season? There’s a lot of overused phrases in the sports world, and “Coaches are hired to be fired,” is definitely one of them. Unfortunately, the thing with overused phrases is that they exist for a reason — most coaches get fired, regardless of how much previous success they accomplished. Despite his two Stanley Cups, Sullivan is 100 percent on the hot seat going into 2024-25, and a string of losses early in the season could force management’s hand.

Last season, Dubas told reporters at a press conference that he was “certain” Sullivan was “the best person to help us,” but when management starts telling media that “we have complete faith in our coach,” they’re starting to lose faith in their coach. We’ll see just how much faith Dubas has if the Penguins are near the bottom of the division in mid-November.

2. Can the goaltending play above average? As I mentioned earlier, Jarry and Nedeljkovic gave the Penguins league-average goaltending last season, and for a team with no X-factor beyond Crosby, the Penguins were a middling franchise with aging stars and suspect depth.

Looking at their roster going into 2024-25, it doesn’t look much better, so if this team is going to have any shot at competing for a spot in the dance come mid-April, their goaltending will need to improve drastically. Whether they both take steps forward or one of them pulls ahead and starts stealing wins, it’s imperative they play better. Otherwise, Pittsburgh will again be left without an invite to the big dance.

3. Will management be willing to try and win for Crosby? While I finished writing this piece, news came out that Crosby and the Penguins agreed to terms on a two-year extension that would pay their captain his typical $8.7 million per year. Wonderful news for fans, but does that mean management is willing to sell off assets and draft picks and try to make the playoffs? We saw Dubas do that exact thing when trading for Karlsson, and I’m sure if you gave the Penguins’ president of hockey ops and GM a vile of truth serum, he would call it a mistake.

How management decides they will be either buyers or sellers depends on whether they’re able to stay competitive in the Metropolitan Division beyond the second week of the season. If they’re in the hunt in February, look for them to attempt hockey’s version of The Last Dance. If they’re where they were last season, it might be time to start looking at where their best players would fit in at the Trade Deadline.

PREDICTION

There’s at least a handful of future Hall of Famers in this lineup, and I could envision another magical individual season from Crosby, but this Penguins team is on the outside looking in when it comes to the postseason. I don’t think they’re better than any one of the New York Rangers, New York Islanders or New Jersey Devils, and the Atlantic Division will claw at both of the Wildcard spots. With a lineup that isn’t better than last season’s squad, Penguins fans may have to face the reality that they’ll miss the playoffs for a third straight year.

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