The Penguins seem lost from top to bottom

Wednesday was a very discouraging day

The 2023-24 season has been a discouraging one for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Despite having four future Hall of Famers on the roster, including a couple that are still playing at a high level, they find themselves steamrolling toward a second straight non-playoff season.

The bottom-six can’t score.

The power play is a disaster. A game-losing, season-crushing disaster.

They are wasting what has mostly been a great season of goaltending.

Jake Guentzel’s days with the team seem numbered.

The head coach seems to have lost the plot and no longer seems able to get his message through.

The general manager seems hesitant to commit to a direction and keeps putting off having to make that decision.

As frustrating and disappointing as all of that has been, Wednesday seemed to be one of the most discouraging days of the entire season, and it started with a rather combative — and absurd — answer from head coach Mike Sullivan.

When asked about the Penguins’ struggles to win one-goal games, a very valid question given the number of one-goal games the Penguins have lost this season and after they were coming off their second in as many games, Sullivan gave one of the most puzzling answers he has ever given during his time as Penguins’ head coach.

There were a lot of different ways Sullivan could have answered that.

He could have blamed the power play and said they need to get better there. He could have talked about their struggles in overtime and what they can or should do to try and fix it. He could have taken the easy and lazy way out and simply talked about how many they have just been a little unlucky and only need a few more bounces to go their way. The puck luck angle was right there.

Instead of taking any of those positions, he decided to speak down to the reporter, insult them by saying their question lacked context, and justified the Penguins’ record in one-goal games by talking about the number of times they have trailed by multiple goals and fought back to make it a one-goal game.

Mike.

That is absurd. It does not do anything to help your cause. It’s not better to lose a lot of one-goal games because your team had to fight back from a bigger deficit earlier in the game. If anything it’s even worse because why in the hell are you losing by multiple goals so often?

But since Sullivan likes context, only six of their 17 one-goal losses have been in games where they trailed by multiple goals and “pushed back” to make it a one-goal loss.

They have also had several one-goal losses where they blew leads, including two one-goal losses where they blew multiple goal leads. But I am guessing that is not the context Sullivan wanted to add to the question or the discussion.

It’s like standing there and proudly talking about how you trapped 50 rats while your house still has hundreds more running free (yes, I borrowed the rat analogy).

Ultimately what it sounds like is a coach that knows his seat is — or should be — scorching hot, and perhaps hotter than any other coach in professional sports at the moment.

After Sullivan spoke, Kyle Dubas took the podium for the first time in a couple of months and talked about where the team is. I didn’t expect him to divulge much — or any — of his plan, but it still struck me as a discouraging session. Mainly because it just seemed like there continues to be a sense of uncertainty as to what the team is or should be.

He had previously talked about the All-Star break being his line in the sand for deciding what the team should do.

That has come and gone.

He said on Wednesday that, even though he doesn’t see the team trading futures this season, the next couple of weeks will help him decide what’s next, likely in terms of selling.

I’m not sure what the next six or seven games are going to tell you that the first 53 didn’t. Unless they rip off a six-game winning streak (which seems unlikely given ... gesture hands wildly everything) their season result seems pretty well determined at this point.

He also dismissed any notion of needing a coaching change and went as far as to say there isn’t a need to discuss Sullivan’s status. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The “vote of confidence” with a coach is about as valuable as a Schrute Buck. What GM’s say and what GM’s do are two very different things.

It did, however, provoke a thought in my head — what if Dubas doesn’t have the freedom to make a coaching change, even if he wanted to? Given Sullivan’s contract status that might be an ownership call and whether or not FSG wants to pay two coaches at the moment. I am still not sure what to think of FSG as an ownership group. On one hand, they have been wildly successful with Liverpool. You can not ignore that. But they also run the Boston Red Sox like they are a mid-market team and not only have the Boston media and fans calling them out, but also former (and current!) players.

The thing that troubled me the most was all of his talk about needing to get younger and all of the 30-something contracts the team has. And he’s not wrong. But the problem I have with him talking about that is he largely contributed to the number of 30-something contracts on the team.

Everybody knew in the offseason the Penguins needed to get younger. It was a pretty consistent talking point.

His offseason moves consisted of trading for 33-year-old Erik Karlsson (signed for four years), trading for 32-year-old Reilly Smith (signed for two years), signing 32-year-old forward Noel Acciari (for three years), signed 34-year-old center Lars Eller (for two years), signed 31-year-old Matt Nieto (for two years), and signed 28-year-old Ryan Graves (for six years through his age 34 season).

Buddy.

Pal.

You contributed to that.

As I wrote earlier this week, it is very easy — and still justifiable — to blame Ron Hextall for a lot of the problems with this roster, both in terms of what he left behind and what he did, but a significant portion of this roster belongs to Dubas. The need to get younger didn’t just happen over the past six months. And now the Penguins have even more 30-somethings to deal with signed to long-term deals.

I am not even trying to make this a sweeping criticism of all of those moves.

I still like the Karlsson trade, even if his play has not been what we hoped.

The Smith trade looked fine at the time, it just hasn’t worked.

Eller has been okay.

But the fact remains, you can’t talk about needing to get younger half a season after actively making the team older.

I am not giving up on Dubas. I am not going to be critical of the hire at this point. But criticism is warranted, and it is also fair to point out that one of his big blind spots in Toronto was a struggle to fill out his roster with quality depth around his stars. If you go move-by-move during his Toronto tenure there were just as many misses at hits, and quite a few head-scratchers. There is a reason a team with four superstars at the top of the lineup only won its division one time (a division title that should come with a significant asterisk given the Frankenstein nature of the league and its divisional alignment that season) and won a single playoff series in seven years. It was not a fluke or bad luck.

A lot of this with the Penguins is unavoidable. It is true no team stays on top forever and after nearly two decades of brilliance the Penguins were always going to have a decline. It is inevitable. But that does not mean we can not still be critical of how it is happening, and whether or not it is happening before it actually needs to happen or should happen. Honestly, my confidence in the Penguins from top to bottom is about as low as it has been since the early 2000s. Everything just seems to be a mess and I am not sure how you fix it. Or how easy it is going to be to fix.