The Pittsburgh Penguins Are In Hockey Hell
All good things must eventually come to an end — but by putting off the inevitable, Pittsburgh now finds itself in an impossible situation.
The blessings of a generational superstar, and a dynasty, have one inevitable downside: It all has to end sometime. And the ending is usually unpleasant, one way or another.
It hasn’t been the same in New England, for instance, since Tom Brady split acrimoniously with the Patriots. Michael Jordan’s departure left the Bulls in shambles; things were ugly in L.A. for years as Kobe Bryant’s career wound down. An abrupt ending can lead to years of struggle as the franchise must reset itself.
But sometimes, trying to push around the dying embers of greatness can be just as destructive, scattering what little remains into ashes.
That’s the problem the Pittsburgh Penguins are currently facing. By dragging out the Sidney Crosby Era as long as possible, they’ve now put themselves in a bind where neither present-day success nor a future reset can happen — essentially, the worst possible place for a franchise to reside.
The current Pens are a disaster. While still just 5 points out of the Eastern Conference’s final Wild Card spot, they’re looking up at six teams who sit between them and that playoff position. They’re also just a really bad team who has no business thinking about the playoffs anyway.
Pittsburgh has a -0.72 goals per game differential and ranks 30th out of 32 NHL teams in Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS), ahead of only the Chicago Blackhawks and San Jose Sharks. This helps explain why the Pens only have a 5 percent chance of making the playoffs, according to my Elo simulation model:
They still have Crosby, who is putting up at least superficially Crosby-like numbers: 51 points in 50 games. But with the fewest Goals Created per game of his career (0.35) and a career-low minus-19 plus/minus, things have been an uphill struggle for Sid the Kid this season — and he is probably the Penguin who’s held up his end of the bargain the most, by far. The rest of the Pens’ veterans — names like Erik Karlsson, Kris Letang, Evgeni Malkin, Matt Grzelcyk and goalie Tristan Jarry1 — are uniformly tracking for either the worst, or at least near-worst, seasons of their careers according to Adjusted Goals Above Replacement (GAR):
Again, the story of a team trying to run it back one last time with beloved franchise icons — Crosby, Malkin and Letang won 3 Stanley Cups together in the late 2000s and 2010s — isn’t exactly unique in the history of pro sports. Every team that finds success with a core like this has to eventually come to terms with their downturn.
What makes the 2024-25 Penguins unique is the prison they built for themselves by repeatedly doubling down on that core. For example, despite missing the playoffs with the NHL’s oldest roster in 2022-23, Pittsburgh (as led by then-new GM Kyle Dubas) traded for the productive defenseman Karlsson, despite his own spotty history of making his teams better. While being willing to part with some sought-after vets — trading Jake Guentzel and Jeff Petry, letting Jason Zucker walk, etc. — the Pens mainly clung tightly to a core that kept getting older, less flexible and, ultimately, less successful.
Now is when they would appear to be at the end of the line, with an awful goal differential, those nearly nonexistent playoff odds and a roster that still ranks as the oldest in the league. One might think at least some of the Pens’ parts might still have value on the trade market, which seemed to fuel speculation earlier this week that Pittsburgh was open for business on a deadline “fire sale” that is probably much-needed at this point.
The only problem, and the factor that seems to be dampening those fire-sale rumors, is that most of the Penguins’ players are under contract for next season as well. As Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic put it:
[T]he idea that there will be some massive fire sale ahead of March 7 also would be an exaggeration, if for no other reason than the fact the team doesn’t have that many notable pending UFAs.
Obviously, 2025 UFA defenseman Marcus Pettersson will be of interest. But beyond that, all of the recognizable or useful names on the roster have term past this season. That doesn’t mean they can’t be traded, but so-called “hockey trades” are more difficult to pull off in-season. Usually, there are more suitors and a more flexible marketplace in the summer.
In other words, the Penguins are stuck in hockey hell. They have an old, bad team on their hands; they can’t do much to turn any of their useful (depreciating) assets into future talent; their record isn’t quite bad enough to have much chance at the No. 1 pick in the draft (in part because they’ve gotten the second-most Bettman Points of any team); and they won’t have a huge amount of cap space available (21st-most) in the offseason.
The end of the Penguins’ glory days with Crosby and company was always going to be painful, because that’s the general rule when a golden era finally fizzles out. But Pittsburgh has provided a particular masterclass in how badly things can go when trying to manage the transition out of a franchise’s boom period. Now we can only see how much worse things can get before they get better again.
Who was demoted to the minor leagues earlier this month.