Mike Johnston and his Pittsburgh Penguins are doing it all wrong.
They are pretending to be a team that they are not.
Currently Pittsburgh's coach has the masquerading as a defensive hockey team. The coach is trying to make all of his players play a responsible 200 foot game. The problem is that by doing so he has intentionally put his players in a position to fail. He is not maximizing his players strengths and that is especially true for the higher end forwards.
It would be one thing if all of the attention that is being paid to defense was producing results, but it just isn't.
Pittsburgh remains one of the worst teams in allowing shot attempts. They are 27th overall in CA/60 at 57.0. The fascination with playing defensive hockey has neutered the teams ability to generate shot attempts. They are only 18th in the league with a CF/60 of 52.5. That isn't nearly good enough with their revamped forward group.
Sidney Crosby has the lowest possession numbers of his career and has been held scoreless on a nightly basis so far this year. Something isn't right with how the Penguins are playing because it is complete rubbish for Sidney Crosby to have numbers like that.
It isn't just Sidney Crosby either. Almost every player on the Penguins has seen a drop in their possession this year when compared to their previous three year average.
The only player who has seen an improvement is Phil Kessel and that has a lot to do with the fact that he played on some of the worst teams of the analytics era in Toronto. It would be one thing if only a few players saw a drop, but it is every single player (sans Kessel) who has a legit sample size from the past few seasons. Most of those examples include players who have been on the Penguins for the entire sample size.
I want to bring up the Penguins and their 27th overall ranking in CA/60 again. I'm doing so because there is another really interesting team who is right there with them and that team is the Dallas Stars. Dallas is pretty bad at shot suppression, too. They rank 26th in CA/60 at 56.7. However, the Dallas Stars know what kind of team they are. They aren't ashamed of it and they certainly don't try to pretend otherwise. They may stink at shot suppression but they are the best team in the NHL at generating shot attempts. They lead the NHL in CF/60 at 62.2. Lindy Ruff has accepted the kind of team he has and what works best for his personnel grouping. Mike Johnston has not done the same.
Pittsburgh currently has a goal differential of -1 on the year while Dallas is doing a lot better at +18. Dallas is 19 goals better than Pittsburgh despite having similar shot suppression woes. What makes it even more remarkable is that Dallas is the 24th ranked team in EVSV% while Pittsburgh is second overall in the league (.941 vs .921). This is alarming because Pittsburgh won't continue to receive .941 goaltending for the entire year. It is very plausible that Dallas can continue to get by at .921 because that is where league average usually falls each and every year.
Dallas is probably the most fun team in the league to watch while Pittsburgh despite all of its high end talent is one of the more boring teams to watch so far this year. This falls on Mike Johnston's doorstep.
I have a personal story to share that relates to the current issues the Penguins are having. About four years ago I was coaching a high school hockey team and we had a good top six highlighted by some very high end forwards. The forward depth behind those players was also above average. The defense was OK. It wasn't excellent, but it wasn't a liability either. Our team's issue was the fact that both of our goaltenders were 5'7" freshman. It wasn't an ideal situation. It wasn't their fault they couldn't stop more pucks. They just weren't big enough.
At the beginning of the season we came together as a coaching staff and decided we were going to do our best to insulate the goaltender position and attempt to keep all of the opposition's shots on the perimeter. We elected to start the season with the trappiest trap you've ever seen. The results were less than desirable. No matter how hard we tried to clog up the other team's attack we found out that when you are playing on your heels you are always going to allow the other team more opportunities than you want to give them. Even worse was the impact it had on our super skilled players. They weren't generating any offense at all. We were only scoring one or two goals a game. We lost games to teams that weren't even close to as talented as us.
After learning the hard way we drastically changed our approach. We accepted who we were as a team and played to our strengths instead of trying to hide our weaknesses. Instead of trapping we changed to an ultra aggressive 2-3 forecheck and unleashed the dogs. We started scoring five and six goals per game. We still gave up our share but we started winning games again. It was also a hell of a lot more fun to watch. Two of our forwards earned first team all county and the third player on our top line won our team MVP award. Our last game of the year ended in a 7-5 defeat where we outshot the other team 34-24. Ultimately our weakness caught up with us, but we went down swinging with our strengths.
The point is the Penguins aren't going to magically become a good defensive team just because they want to be. You need proper personnel to accomplish that. Pittsburgh doesn't have the kind of roster necessary to make that happen. The good news for the Penguins is that unlike high school hockey NHL teams have the opportunity to make changes to their roster mid-season.
Until then the team's best chance to win games is to let Sid and Geno do their thing and let the other lines try their best to match them. The point of having four scoring lines is to try and score when each line is on the ice. Right now Mike Johnston has them all trying to play defense and it has come at the expense of his team's ability to generate offense. The worst part of it all has been the fact they aren't even good defensively. Mike Johnston's 2015-16 approach has been a complete failure to this point.
The superstars aren't playing like superstars, possession is down across the board, and the team is still bleeding shot attempts against.
Time to take a page out of the Dallas Stars book and just be who you are. It will be more fun and probably more successful.
Thanks for reading!
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