The Pittsburgh Penguins must ask the age old question: Reload or rebuild?
A stunning loss to the lowly Blackhawks began a snowball effect that quickly saw the Pittsburgh Penguins drop out of the playoffs for the first time since Sidney Crosby was a rookie. The franchise predictably changed directions in the front office just days after its elimination. On Friday’s edition of Daily Faceoff Live, hosts Matt Larkin and Steven Ellis discussed whether Crosby, Malkin, and co. will press on for more Cups, or finally step back and rebuild.
Matt Larkin: As reported by our very own Frank Seravalli, the Pittsburgh Penguins announced this morning that president of hockey operations Brian Burke is out, GM Ron Hextall is out, and assistant GM Chris Pryor is out. Big news for a team that just ended its playoff streak at 16 years. What is your immediate reaction to this bomb? What went wrong for this regime?
Steven Ellis: This one wasn’t exactly surprising, we could see this one coming. The current ownership inherited this group. There were some questions when this regime took over as to whether they could do enough to make this good.
It’s one thing to go in and start fresh, but these guys took over when the Penguins had one of the worst prospect pools, an aging core, and didn’t really seem to be moving in the right direction. Burke and Hextall didn’t really do anything to address that. The prospect pool is still terrible, the big trade deadline acquisition this year was Mikael Granlund and that didn’t work out. A lot of people pointed to that and said that was not a good deal from the beginning.
The biggest downfall was not addressing their goaltending concerns, Rob Rossi was on here a couple weeks ago talking about that and I have to agree. When you look at Tristan Jarry and Casey DeSmith, even before you factor in injuries, those are two goalies I don’t know if you can rely on to be playoff caliber, especially when you look at the teams they had to fight in the wild card race.
Just poor decisions the whole time, and something needed to be changed. At this point they probably have to do a full rebuild. I know that’s hard to do when you’ve got Crosby and you signed Malkin and Letang to deals but if this team keeps doing patchwork you’re not getting anywhere.
Matt Larkin: It’s tough because Hextall and Burke came into a tough situation with a team that was already on the down slope of its contention window and Jim Rutherford had gone for broke. It was worth it getting those Stanley Cups, but the prospect pool was depleted. Yes, it was a tough assignment to keep the oldest team in the NHL, the only team with an average age over 30, in the hunt, but I never liked the double hire there.
They were two contradictory personalities; Brian Burke is a win now guy who makes aggressive trades, while Ron Hextall dating back to his tenure in Philadelphia was extremely conservative as a GM. You had a conservative guy and a wild man trying to work together. I don’t think it was ever going to be a recipe for success, and if you look at the deals they made they were just limping along.
Jeff Carter. Rickard Rakell was a decent acquisition, but then Granlund as you said. Jeff Petry. They were adding in a lot of older pieces just trying to stay alive, and sort of a team in denial. I think the end of this playoff streak was a blessing, because the Pittsburgh Penguins were headed down the same path as the Detroit Red Wings, who had made the playoffs 25 years in a row and set themselves back years with bad contracts.
Like you said Steven, the new regime has a tough decision to make. They have Crosby ,and Malkin and Letang extended, but if they push forward and try to reload, that’s risky. You could saddle yourself with more bad contracts. Do they just take a step back and say, “I don’t think we have the horses?”
The problem is, like we saw in Chicago with Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, your franchise pillars might not be receptive to that. It will be a very interesting offseason in Pittsburgh.
You can watch the entire episode here…