PITTSBURGH — Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang, fierce competitors that they are, broke character on Tuesday night. For a moment, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ 5-3 loss to the Minnesota Wild didn’t matter. And for a moment, the Penguins’ 3-7-1 start, and the inevitable plunge that all great teams eventually take, didn’t matter.
For just a moment, honoring Marc-André Fleury took precedence. Soaking in the nostalgia was what mattered. Offering an appropriate goodbye was what mattered.
Penguins fans would do well to emulate Crosby and Letang because it’s going to get worse before it gets better. That much is becoming clear.
This season isn’t about the Penguins getting better. There is no evidence they will. It’s not about the wave of young players who will guide the Penguins into the next generation. That wave isn’t here yet. It’s almost certainly not about the Penguins producing a last gasp and making an improbable playoff run. The odds of that happening are minuscule.
This season is about Evgeni Malkin scoring goal No. 500. It’s about Crosby recording his 1,600th point. At some point in the next month, it’ll be about Crosby scoring his 600th goal. Next season may well be about saying farewell to Malkin.
This isn’t what many fans want, of course. They want championships. They want the playoffs. They want excellence. As they should. Pittsburgh is a big-league town with 16 professional championships to its name.
But let’s live in reality for a moment. Let’s analyze the carnage.
The Penguins’ No. 1 goaltender, Tristan Jarry, is so broken that he’s in Wilkes-Barre to spend a nice chunk of the autumn in the AHL. Monitoring Jarry’s progress when he returns to Pittsburgh in November will be interesting and worth watching, but this situation doesn’t inspire any confidence in the team’s chances moving forward.
Alex Nedeljkovic is a great backup. He’s a solid NHL goaltender. He’s not leading this team to the promised land because I don’t think even Dominik Hasek could. Joel Blomqvist has done a very nice job. He’s a legitimate NHL goaltender in the making, but again, as wonderful as he’s been, he’s managed to win two games. Not his fault. But he’s not going to make that much of a difference.
The blue line has been disappointing. Let’s break it down. You might have to hide your children’s eyes for this part:
• Letang has struggled this season, though I’ll give him fairly high marks for his work on the power play.
Still, he doesn’t look like himself, just like he didn’t look like himself in the second half of last season. Is Father Time the problem? I don’t know. Maybe. But Letang is not right, and when he’s not right, the Penguins suffer.
• Matt Grzelcyk has been painfully bad in the past four games. It would seem that last season in Boston, where he struggled mightily, accurately foreshadowed what was to come. His play is problematic.
• Ryan Graves? You know, he’s actually been better this season. But he hasn’t been good. The bar is way lower than it once was.
• I like Jack St. Ivany, but he had a rough start to the season. I think he’ll be fine, but again, he’s not impactful. He’s a nice third-pairing defenseman.
• I’m a huge Marcus Pettersson fan, but he’s off to a slow start. He’s as good as gone come the NHL trade deadline.
• Then, there is Erik Karlsson. The Penguins were guilty of 15 giveaways against the Wild. He was charged with five of them. For the season, he’s on pace for 37 takeaways and 171 giveaways, which would exceed his career high by 56.
He said last week that he thinks he’s playing “great” and, as best I could tell, he wasn’t answering my question with any degree of sarcasm. While I admire that kind of confidence, I’m troubled by how he’s performed this season. I’ve had current general managers, former general managers, coaches around the league and players around the league ask me what’s going on with Karlsson. Other than the fact that he was injured in training camp, I don’t have an answer for them. He’s a disaster.
This brings us to the forwards.
Michael Bunting isn’t the same player as last season. His regression is noticeable and troubling.
Bryan Rust is hurt, which is a theme with him, even though his value shouldn’t be diminished. He’s a wonderful player.
Crosby has one goal in 11 games and doesn’t have a five-on-five goal. Should we be concerned about the captain? Given how he has started the season, I’m willing to bet that most of you have wondered if it finally happened — if age caught up to him, the god turning into man before our eyes.
It will happen at some point. Maybe it is happening. But I don’t think so. Crosby has had a slow start to the season but he’ll be fine. We’ve seen him in similar funks before, and he always escapes them and becomes Crosby again. I believe that will be the case.
But here’s what’s really scary for the Penguins: They’ve had many players exceed expectations, some by a significant amount. Malkin has been sensational. So, too, has Rickard Rakell. Drew O’Connor has been good. Bottom-six players Lars Eller, Kevin Hayes, Noel Acciari and Anthony Beauvillier have all been better than expected.
So, seven forwards have exceeded expectations. And still, the Penguins are 3-7-1. That’s not a good sign, and this isn’t a good team.
This mess is going to take a while for general manager and president Kyle Dubas to figure out — assuming he can and will figure it out. Where does Mike Sullivan fit in? He’s a great coach, but the Penguins don’t look like a well-coached team, and that’s a problem.
I’ve been reminded of the late-’90s Penguins during this stretch. They weren’t good enough to win a championship, not by a long shot. However, many memorable moments made that era fun for fans, which made purchasing a ticket worthwhile. I’ll direct you to the 1996-97 Penguins. At the time, we believed that was Mario Lemieux’s final season. There were moments during that season that still resonate almost three decades later, even though that Penguins team barely made the playoffs and wasn’t very good at all. Lemieux scored an NHL goal on his first shot and first shift, and in 1997, he ended the first phase of his career by scoring a goal on his last shot and last shift.
Lemieux scored his 600th goal that season. He scored four goals in the third period in his penultimate stop in his hometown, Montreal. Later that season, in his final game in Montreal, he put up five points and, when the game was over, skated to the Canadiens bench and was embraced by Montreal’s owners as the Bell Centre went wild. In Lemieux’s final game against Colorado, Patrick Roy skated over to the Penguins as they left the ice to embrace Lemieux, a couple of French Canadian icons facing off for the final time.
Mario was bigger than the Penguins, just like Crosby and Malkin are bigger than the Penguins.
Those are inedible images. Being a sports fan isn’t always about willing your team to a championship or playing armchair GM. It’s about the moments — the memories — as much as it is the championships. Pittsburgh has been very lucky and spoiled. Maybe more championships remain, but it’s going to be a while. Playoff hockey in Pittsburgh isn’t a rite of spring, and it won’t be here in April.
For a long, long time, however, it was a rite of spring, because Crosby and Malkin made it that way. The golden era of Penguins hockey lasted almost 20 years. It’s over now, and all that remains is the nostalgia and the larger-than-life figures who still remain. On one level, it can be viewed as bittersweet or even depressing to see Crosby and Malkin skating with a team this bad.
Do as you wish. Get angry at this team’s amateurish play. It’s warranted. As a fan, that’s your right, and I’m not here to order you in any particular direction.
For your sanity, however, I’d suggest watching Crosby and Malkin skate out their final days in the only jersey they’ll ever wear, and appreciate who they are as people, what they’ve done and the special memories still to come.
(Photo of Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby: Charles LeClaire / Imagn Images)
