(Author’s note: I completed this post prior to yesterday’s trade: the Penguins sent Lars Eller to the Washington Capitals in exchange for a fifth round draft pick this coming summer as well as a third-rounder in 2017. The more immediate benefit for Pittsburgh is moving Eller freed up a bunch of cap space, roughly $2.5M. Eller was pretty consistently the third center on the depth chart, not very productive offensively but pretty good defensively. Whether this will lead to another trade in the near future to replace Eller really depends on the performance of the guys who might be called in to replace him. Are Blake Lizotte or Noel Acciari that guy? Or is Sam Poulin? I’m not confident in any of those guys to be an improvement from Eller…and maybe that’s the point.)

This is the most immensely dissatisfying Pittsburgh Penguins team I have ever seen. Once again we have to be honest with ourselves, as we’ve been very lucky to have seen two great eras of hockey in Pittsburgh since I’ve been alive: Mario and Jagr through the 1990s, and Sid and Geno since 2006. The Penguins have won five Stanley Cups in these last 33 years, more than any other team. Consequently, they have also had a couple short spans where they have not been at least a playoff team: from 2001 to 2006, and for the last two-plus seasons. But at least with that first stint, when Pittsburgh finished last in the Atlantic Division each of the four seasons, that was not a team that anybody was expecting to take seriously.

The first year was Alexei Kovalev’s last full year as a Penguin as he led the team in points and was the only player (besides Mario Lemieux, who played only 24 games) to be a point-per-game player. The next year the duo were point-per-game players again, but on February 10, 2003 Kovalev was infamously traded to the New York Rangers and Mario was left without any proper help again. The following season, Marc-Andre Fleury’s first in Pittsburgh, Mario played in only 10 games in what otherwise has been remembered for defenseman Dick Tarnstrom leading the team in points (52!). 2004-05 was locked out, and 2006 was Mario’s last and Sid’s first. For the following sixteen seasons the Penguins worst year was the 2014-15 season, Mike Johnston’s first and only full season as their head coach wherein Pittsburgh was dumped in the first round of the playoffs. The Penguins would go on to replace Johnston with Mike Sullivan the following season and win two straight championships.

Say what you will about former general manager Jim Rutherford, but the man would not rest if he saw an opportunity to shake things up. More often than not the shakeups didn’t work, especially after the second-straight Stanley Cup win in 2017, and he wasted a number of first round picks in his pursuit of making Pittsburgh better. At that time there was still some measure of hope as the Penguins were talented enough to have modest confidence to make the playoffs, and maybe if his acquisitions worked the team would be more competitive. Compare that with the current iteration of the Pittsburgh Penguins which are pretty hopeless for the playoffs, with a worse record now than any completed Penguins season since the 2005-06 season. The ceiling is way lower for this Pittsburgh team than those under Rutherford, notwithstanding the fact that their competition is the toughest it’s been in years.

My observation is that the Penguins right now are, or very soon to be, in what I am calling “soft tank” mode. There is obviously still some talent on this team, but we’re talking about Sidney Crosby, maybe Evgeni Malkin, and maybe Joel Blomqvist (who is on the cusp of being sent back to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton), and that’s it. Erik Karlsson is a train wreck. Kris Letang is old and busted. Bryan Rust is just busted. Marcus Pettersson can’t save the Penguins from Karlsson’s helplessness on defense. Tristan Jarry is apparently a great AHL goalie. The rest of the team are underperforming, overvalued, streaky, and just an uncoordinated mash of hockey players. They are losing games to playoff-caliber teams left and right and by huge margins with few exceptions (LOL Capitals), and they’re winning games against non-playoff-caliber teams in modest fashion. They’re simply not playing like they are invested in trying to make the playoffs, which…might be the point?

The growing reality of the impending end of the Crosby/Malkin/Letang era is that the preparations for the next wave of excellent Pittsburgh Penguins teams has to begin now. Those 2001-2006 Penguins didn’t have any legends on their rosters besides Lemieux, so it wasn’t hard to divest from how they’re playing, and subsequently they were pretty bad. While it is emotionally difficult to see the Penguins losing with their core three veterans still around, that’s unfortunately what they’re being paid for. General manager Kyle Dubas may not be intending for the Penguins to be a contender, or even a pretender right now; it would have been a bonus if that’s how things were working out, but it’s not. Subsequently, if at the end of this season the prize for being bad is a future key contributor or once-in-a-generation-type player, that’s well worth the investment of a bad season. Given that they currently have the fifth-worst record in the NHL and that they are only two points away from being the worst, there’s an opportunity here for Pittsburgh to end up with a top-five pick this summer.

I don’t envy Kyle Dubas in this situation, because there are obviously a lot of Penguins fans (and certainly a number of players) who didn’t expect the team to be playing so poorly. Patience is rewarded in time, and that is something Jim Rutherford never really grasped. The one universal truth I always return to is that teams must be bad before they can be good. The Penguins have been bad twice before and eventually became champions as a result of the draft picks they got from being bad. It’s pretty consistent that teams which make top-five draft picks soon become contenders. At the same time, if you’re playing around in mediocrity you’re not going to get anywhere now or in the future. Pittsburgh has gone several years in mediocrity and it’s gotten them very little besides a handful of first-round exits and some modest prospects. I think it’s beyond time to set off on a tank, and considering the quality of the guys at the top of the next two drafts, there’s a good reason to start sooner rather than later.

So it’s a soft tank because they still have some talented players and they have to retain some self-respect by winning against the weaker teams for the sake of their veterans and their sensitive fanbase. Their rivals for the bottom of the standings are helping the cause by not being completely in the tank like San Jose had been for the last couple of years. It also likely means Mike Sullivan is not going anywhere, unless you think firing him would make the team worse, in which case go ahead! But with the reports yesterday that everyone except Crosby is up the trading block (although probably not Malkin and Letang), it sounds like we are headed for some bad times. Which, again, I am fine with! It would be nicer though if the Penguins weren’t losing by four, five, six, almost seven goals every night. Maybe just one or two?

Tonight Pittsburgh hosts the Detroit Red Wings, currently a non-playoff team, which the Penguins beat 6-3 on opening night October 10. The Red Wings are one of the League’s weakest teams offensively as they have scored the second-fewest goals and have the League’s second-worst expected goals for per 60 minutes at even strength. At the same time they are not a great team defensively either, as they are near the top of the League in allowing shot attempts, shots-on-goal, and expected goals. The only thing saving them right now is their goaltending, third-best in the NHL at even strength and eighth-best overall. They made the smart move waiving Ville Husso, as Cam Talbot and Alex Lyon are performing much better. But it’s still a disappointing start to the year for the Red Wings, whose maturing prospects are still not good enough to lift Detroit out of the bottom of the Atlantic Division.