It’s not a pretty picture in Pittsburgh Penguins land right now. On Monday they lost to the Ottawa Senators 2-1 in game where they took 91 shot attempts (tied for second-most by the Penguins this season and the most in a losing effort) on a goaltender making his first career NHL start, almost as though they were doing him a favor by making him work so hard. Pittsburgh had three power play opportunities and failed miserably on all of them. Rickard Rakell scored with about five-and-a-half minutes left in regulation to tie the game at one goal apiece, but Ottawa took back the lead with a power play goal of their own with about two minutes left in regulation. And so it would go that the Penguins would drop their fourth game in a row for the fourth time this season and, concurrent with the Florida Panthers beating the Detroit Red Wings as well on Monday, Pittsburgh is now in ninth place in the Eastern Conference and out of the playoff discussion with eleven games left on the regular season schedule.

I’m pretty sure I’ve run out of ways to express my disappointment with this team and how they have played this season. They have been all over the map all season long despite their best players staying pretty healthy. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin have played all seventy games to this point, along with Rickard Rakell _{(and Brian Dumoulin)}. Bryan Rust, Jake Guentzel, Jason Zucker, and Marcus Pettersson have all missed only a handful of games (but of course Pettersson is expected to miss at best all but the last couple of games as he went on long-term injured reserve prior to Monday’s game). But those top guys can only carry this team so far, as they lack for serious forward depth and, most crucially, quality, consistent goaltending. Tristan Jarry did well against the Senators, but naturally the offense wasn’t up to the task. Conversely it seems that when the offense does come to play, Jarry does not. It’s not an encouraging sign from a guy in the last year of his contract but who also made it through the goaltending logjam that initially included Marc-Andre Fleury and Matt Murray, but also Filip Gustavsson who, in case you hadn’t noticed, is single-handedly carrying the Minnesota Wild to the playoffs right now in his platoon with Fleury.

Dismal. Bleak. Abysmal. Go get your own thesaurus and find some other adjectives for the situation at hand. Unfortunately for all of us there are still three weeks left to this doomed season. Knowing the end is so close yet so far away is agonizing. I know hopelessness isn’t a fun experience for anyone but I do have hope for what lies beyond the end of this season. Even if Mike Sullivan isn’t relieved of his head coaching duties (he has a three-year contract extension that doesn’t even begin until after the end of next season), Ron Hextall will very likely be fired as general manager, and Brian Burke might just join him on the breadlines. They have to be fired at this point, regardless of the outcome of this season, right? Let’s consider the two realistic paths for how things will go from here on out:

1. Pittsburgh makes the playoffs but only just as a wild card team, meaning they’ll face either the Boston Bruins or the winner of the Metropolitan Division. They have next to no hope of winning a series against any of those teams, and so while their playoff streak continues it is only in spirit as they’ll have been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the fifth season in a row. Considering that the stated goal of the franchise is to win the Stanley Cup while the core is still around, and how Hextall went out of his way this past offseason to make sure that core was still around, another season ending with a first round playoff exit is intolerable.
   
2. Pittsburgh misses the playoffs for the first time since the 2005-06 season, a sixteen-year stretch – arguably their most successful run in franchise history – that saw the Penguins win three Stanley Cups, finish another time as Stanley Cup Finalists, and make another Conference Finals appearance. They’ll have a fairly valuable asset in their first-round draft pick (currently #15 overall, could end up around #7 with a chance at a top-two pick if they “drop” to #11 or “better”) and a fair chunk of cap space to work with in the off-season. But, again, missing the playoffs altogether is the antithesis of winning the Cup, let alone seriously competing for the Cup, and this failure should also not be tolerated.

Honestly I like the second scenario much better at this point. Depending on how poorly things go, the Penguins’ first round pick this June could actually be pretty valuable, perhaps even worth a generational talent or a near-certain NHL star that actually could help Pittsburgh next season. Or they could try to package that pick and find themselves a proper #1 goaltender either for now or in the future. If they manage to keep their heads above water in the playoff race (quite foolish as that would be), they are merely decreasing the value of their first round pick while simultaneously indulging in the delusion that they’ll make a serious run at the Cup this spring. In any event, I do not trust Ron Hextall for one second that he will make the right moves this offseason or any offseason in the future. Even if by some extraordinary miracle the Penguins win a couple of rounds or more, it will have been in spite of Hextall’s ineptitude à la Major League. That man should not be the general manager of a fast food restaurant, let alone a professional hockey team. He killed the Flyers, now he’s killing the Penguins.

The worst part of all of this, of course, is that this season will be seen as another wasted year in the twilight of the careers of Messrs. Crosby, Malkin, and Kris Letang. All these legends want to do is win another Stanley Cup, like anyone would, and they want to do it together. They have some good teammates but they also have too many bad ones, and the inability of the current front office group to correctly manage the roster around those three is damnable. It’s not even like Hextall has had to replace twenty guys in his tenure – this team has plenty of good supporting players as well – but he has bungled just about all the ones that he did have to replace. Like his predecessor, Jim Rutherford, he’s made one too many unforced errors, and the on-ice product is a direct result of his incompetence. Mike Sullivan isn’t completely indemnified on that front, but he’s working with what he’s got, and that much alone should doom Hextall and anyone else in his cadre.

Nevertheless, we are left watching in disdain, having been made aware of the inevitability of the train wreck we are currently experiencing in slow-motion with nothing but more time, more disappointment, and more frustration in the offing until the final whistle blows.

IT’S GETTIN’ FUGLIER BY THE MINUTE…