Sometimes the scripts write themselves. Yesterday, Ron Hextall made the decision to put Kasperi Kapanen on waivers less than eight months after signing him to his widely panned extension. If that wasn't enough it was to make cap room for another one of his aimless and pointless contracts, Jan Rutta.
This roster move sums up Ron Hextall's Penguins tenure perfectly. Self inflicted headache after self inflicted headache.
Don't expect the bottom six to improve anytime soon. Ron Hextall is playing all the hockey men hits
Hextall: "You look at our bottom six, for some reason pieces haven't fit... We just try to give the coaches the options we can give them. We are in a tight cap situation, which we're trying to rectify here."
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) February 24, 2023
Wait until they find the guy who did this!
Anybody ready for a time machine back to the late stage Ray Shero years? Too bad cause that's where we are headed.
Friedman on TJMS says he believes the Pens feel this, they need to remake their bottom 6, they need to be harder to play against, they get pushed around a lot. In the playoffs where the games get meaner and nastier, they’re not built for that.
— NHL Watcher (@NHL_Watcher) February 24, 2023
Yeah, Hextall has no idea what he is doing. This is the same attitude which dismantled the Penguins back to back Cup teams. This is the nonsense logic Rutherford went to after Tom Wilson broke his brain. The issue with the bottom six is they can't score, period. If you can't even identify the lack of depth scoring as the issue you have no business being an executive. This is the kind of thinking that has led to the Penguins Jeff Carter problem.
Ron Hextall was specifically asked for his assessment of Jeff Carter's current performance this afternoon.
— Danny Shirey (@DannyShireyPGH) February 24, 2023
His response focused on the bottom six as a whole before footnoting that Carter fills the role of being strong on faceoffs and playing the penalty-kill: pic.twitter.com/fQiQXZAyBo
If the starting point is faceoffs and penalty killing when talking about a player then you aren't talking about a capable player. If they were capable the conversation would be about their offensive or defensive impacts at 5v5, preferably both.
Ron Hextall is a goof and is in over his head. He lacks the basic hockey acumen required to run a team in 2022-23. He has effectively wasted one of the last few solid seasons of Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, write that down.
Thanks for reading!