DALLAS STARS

AT PITTSBURGH PENGUINS

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2023 — 7:30PM EDT

PPG PAINTS ARENA, PITTSBURGH, PA

(Author’s note: I’m not doing the header graphic :P)

Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan is the active second-longest tenured head coach in the NHL, about 33 months shorter than Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper. Typically, head coaches don’t stick around with teams for very long, as evidenced by the fact that more than half of the League’s head coaches have been employed for less than two seasons. A coaching staff’s tenure has a lot to do with how the team performs or is expected to perform; case in point, Rod Brind’Amour has the fourth-longest tenure among active head coaches mainly because the Carolina Hurricanes are considered to be very close to a Stanley Cup. In the case of many head coaches, they also tend to stay employed if they are seen as liked by their players or if they are seen as being hip with modern ways of coaching. By all accounts, all of that is very much the case with Mike Sullivan.

And yet, since the Penguins won their second championship in a row under his guidance, the team’s performance has gone increasingly wayward. As a fan and an outside observer, I can’t help but feel like Sullivan’s messaging has gotten stale. In fact I thought it had several years ago, but it was easy to hide that underneath the shroud of weakened depth and poor goaltending. Whether it is Sullivan’s coaching that’s not as effective as it once was, it is easier to overlook the possibility that the problem could be Sullivan when the on-ice performance is directly the result of the players themselves. And yes, there have been plenty of errors made by the last five years’ of player management, including the ones made by current general manager Kyle Dubas in rebuilding the bottom six to the all-defense/no-offense design which he paid decent money for in his first offseason with Pittsburgh. Even the very best head coach may not be able to make the likes of the Penguins’ bottom six perform better, because there is an innate limitation to their skills and abilities that just cannot be improved.

Nevertheless, when you see Sullivan spend an entire time-out blasting his players for their poor performance in the fifth game of the season, and when you hear his disappointment in press conferences, one must wonder if it’s getting to the point where his shortcomings as a head coach will finally be seen as the issue. No one can know if Dubas is planning to pull the trigger on firing Sullivan or (as many are hoping) any of the assistants (surely Todd Rierden is closer to being canned than Sullivan), but one thing is for certain: Sullivan is under more pressure now than he has been since his hiring, and if the team continues to languish for the next few weeks, his seat will get even hotter.

The next four games on the 2023-24 regular season schedule for Pittsburgh represent the longest homestand of the season (tied with another four-gamer in mid-February), and considering the competition it figures to be a good opportunity to see what these Penguins are made of. Tonight’s foe, the Dallas Stars, are up there with Thursday’s opponent, the Colorado Avalanche, as being serious Stanley Cup contenders again this year. Along with Saturday’s game against the Ottawa Senators and including the last three against Calgary, Detroit, and St. Louis, it’ll make six games in a row against possible playoff teams, a group against whom Pittsburgh did not fare so well last season (15-22-5). It’s an important early-season stretch, and with a 1-2 record against their last three foes, the Penguins are already under .500 heading into the second half of these six games. If they can scrape together a couple of wins against this trio (plus another against Anaheim next Monday before they head out to California), they might be bringing the good vibrations out to the Pacific coast with them next week.