Well, these two upcoming games against the New York Rangers did have the potential to be huge for both teams once upon a time (like a week ago), but with the Pittsburgh Penguins failing to beat the Rangers in regulation on Sunday and failing to beat the Montreal Canadiens at all on Tuesday, the best the Penguins can do at this point is pull within four points of New York and improve their lead on the New York Islanders. Thus this rare regular season back-to-back against a division rival is not a terribly exciting situation, but then again it seems very apropos for a Pittsburgh team that is mired in mediocrity right now.
With now fifteen games and less than a month left on the regular season schedule, normally we should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from a team heading towards the end of the season. With regards to these Penguins, while it is difficult to know on a game-by-game basis just what we’re going to see, generally speaking they are a mediocre team posing as a good team. They have a pretty good top six group of forwards – in fact I would safely say they’re in the top ten in the League – but their bottom six is just as safely in the bottom ten, “led” by Jeff Carter, the anti-Sidney Crosby. Defensively there isn’t as severe a difference between the best and worst players, but there’s still an uncomfortable amount of inconsistency in the group. The goaltending tandem of Tristan Jarry and Casey DeSmith…you would think that a few years of having the same duo might breed some consistency, but, unfortunately and maddeningly, no. Altogether there’s definitely the potential to be a very good team, but heaven help us if they could only get their acts together all at the same time.
In all of the nearly thirty years that I’ve been paying attention to this team, they have never been this consistently mediocre. I would say the next-worst stretch was from 1997 to 2000, when they fell out of the playoffs in the first two rounds in each of those years, but those four years were bookended by Conference Finals appearances, and after 2001 they plunged to the basement for four years and let the draft lottery do all the rebuilding work they needed. Since they won their two straight Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017, Pittsburgh has been booted from the first two rounds of the playoffs for the past five years. This has been through two ownership groups, two general managers…and one head coach.
Not that Mike Sullivan is to blame for the players he has, but how he manages the lineup leaves a lot to be desired. Continuing to ice Jeff Carter is fireable in and of itself, and he really shouldn’t ignore that any longer, even if it means only playing eleven forwards. Continuing to blend the defensive pairings doesn’t help the blueliners develop the familiarity they obviously need to succeed. The power play is finally showing signs of life, but their success continues to be negated by the next few shifts giving up goals. These are consistent problems with Sullivan’s coaching approach. When the team is playing well overall, it’s easy to overlook these problems, but in spite of winning seven of their last nine games, I wouldn’t say the team is playing well overall right now. The teams they’ve beaten lately are mostly out of the playoffs, and the one that is in the playoffs (Tampa Bay) has been notorious in the last several years for not taking the regular season seriously. More to the point, I wouldn’t say this is a Penguins team that would escape the first two rounds of the playoffs for the first time in six years.
Half of Pittsburgh’s remaining schedule is against teams in the playoff race, including four of the next five games, all of those being on the road. They need a much better showing in these last few weeks of the season than they have shown us all season long. I don’t know if they have another gear hidden in their arsenal, but they need to find it.
