What happens to the Pittsburgh Penguins if they miss the playoffs in 2023-24?

Credit: Jake Guentzel (© Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports)

Let’s compare two NHL teams.

Team 1 sits two points out of a Wildcard spot with a .555 points percentage. It ranks in the top third of the league in scoring chance share at 5-on-5 but is held back by a subpar power play. It struggles badly to get depth scoring, with their bottom-six forwards contributing 23 percent of their goals.

Team 2 sits four points out of a Wildcard spot with a .500 points percentage. It ranks in the top third of the league in scoring chance share at 5-on-5 but is held back by a subpar power play. It struggles badly to get depth scoring, with players from their bottom-six forwards contributing 15 percent of their goals.

Recognize the two franchises?

Trick question, of course. Team 1 is the 2022-23 Pittsburgh Penguins. Team 2 is the 2023-24 Pittsburgh Penguins.

But how? After Kyle Dubas rode into town last summer and took over as president of hockey operations and, eventually, GM, he immediately went to work remedying the problems of last season’s Pens, which were the first incarnation to miss the playoffs in 17 years. He added Reilly Smith to the top-six forward group and fortified the bottom six with Noel Acciari, Lars Eller, Vinnie Hinostroza, Matt Nieto and more. He upgraded the D-corps massively by signing Ryan Graves and eventually pulling a blockbuster trade for reigning Norris Trophy winner Erik Karlsson. The Penguins had strapped themselves onto a win-now track when they extended franchise stalwarts Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang the summer prior, and Dubas behaved like a GM doing everything in his power to get his team back in contention mode while legendary superstar Sidney Crosby was still playing elite-level hockey in his mid-to-late 30s.

While few of us were necessarily convinced the Pens, still easily the NHL’s oldest team by average age, were going to make a real run at the Stanley Cup, most of us agreed Dubas massively improved the personnel on paper. In Daily Faceoff’s pre-season prediction panel, five of six voters had Pittsburgh returning to the postseason.

The obvious question to ask is: what on Earth has gone wrong or, more specifically, why has so little changed about the team’s identity? Crosby is still playing like a star. Karlsson has for the most part flourished as a Penguin, not scoring at north of a 100-point pace like he did last year but playing better all-around hockey than he did in San Jose. Bryan Rust is enjoying a resurgence after a down 2022-23. Jake Guentzel remains one of the most underrated scorers in the game. Goaltender Tristan Jarry has stayed healthy and made Dubas look good for committing to him on long-term extension. And yet, last year’s problems continue to plague Pittsburgh. The power play is embarrassingly awful, sputtering at 9.9 percent, seemingly struggling to find the right chemistry between some franchise legends and the newcomer Karlsson. The depth scoring has ghosted even worse than last year’s. Radim Zohorna’s 12-goal pace “leads” the bottom-six forwards on the team.

We can try to search for answers on the X’s and O’s of the power play, why the Pens have so much trouble getting meaningful contributions outside their top six, whether coach Mike Sullivan has lost the dressing room, or why Graves hasn’t delivered as advertised. But, to me, none of these is the most interesting question looming over the team.

What we should be asking is: what happens to the Penguins if they can’t figure this out? What if Dubas’ epic first-year armament goes nowhere?

What happens if we reach March and this team finds itself outside the postseason picture approaching the trade deadline? If the Penguins’ playoff miss gives way to a multi-year playoff drought…what future faces this franchise and its legendary players?

Most of the Pens’ veteran contracts allow little wiggle room for trades in a sell-off scenario. Rust has a full no-movement clause and makes $5.125 million for four more seasons after this one. Malkin has a full no-movement clause and a cap hit of $6.1 million for two more seasons. Kris Letang feels like a Penguins lifer at this point and has four years left at $6.1 million anyway. As last season showed, moving Karlsson’s contract in-season wasn’t possible, and that was with him in the midst of the best offensive season by a blueliner in 31 years. Graves and Jarry have just commenced their long-term deals. Moving captain and franchise Mount Rushmore member Crosby is obviously a non-starter.

The Pens could find themselves limping into the off-season with another playoff miss and no 2024 first-round pick unless the pick is in the top 10 (protected in the Karlsson trade). Even after selecting Owen Pickering and Brayden Yager in the past two drafts, they own one of the league’s most barren prospect crops, the product of contending and punting picks in win-now trades for a decade and a half. They could end up stuck in limbo, too weak to contend, owning too many veterans to totally bottom out, a fate I likened to that of the late Ken Holland-era Detroit Red Wings when I worried about the Penguins’ future last spring.

Unless, of course, Dubas stares down an extremely difficult decision and entertains offers for Guentzel, a 2024 UFA. Among players with at least 50 games, he ranks sixth in NHL history in playoff goals per game behind only Mario Lemieux, Mike Bossy, Maurice Richard, Cam Neely and Wayne Gretzky. Guentzel could command a gargantuan return as a rental commodity, likely a first-round pick or prospect or both. Proven winner and reigning Stanley Cup champion Smith would be movable, too, as a two-year rental. Should the Pens fall out of the race, they aren’t completely without safety nets, then. They could inject themselves with youth to start preparing for a roster reset.

But even that process would include roadblocks. It wouldn’t be possible to strip the roster down to the wood the way you’d really need to if you were blowing it up. You’d still be left with Crosby, Malkin and Letang in that scenario. Ask Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Duncan Keith how much they enjoyed lingering while the Chicago Blackhawks’ former empire crumbled around them. It wouldn’t be an easy sell.

I’m obviously getting ahead of myself, here. The Pens remain a good 5-on-5 team. Their top players are contributing. Their goaltending is strong. Their power play simply can’t remain this bad. They could easily rise up the standings and make the playoffs.

But if they don’t…they’ll serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when you refuse to throw in the towel on a mediocre team and the band-aid solutions don’t work. It’s the type of predicament in which a franchise can dig itself into a hole that takes years to climb out of and produces many playoff misses in a row.

Maybe they figure it out and survive. But whatever happens to the Penguins for the rest of 2023-24: they’ll be extremely fascinating to watch.

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What happens to the Pittsburgh Penguins if they miss the playoffs in 2023-24?

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