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The Pittsburgh Penguins have entered into the post Ray Shero era with his firing from the team yesterday. As of right now Assistant GM Jason Botterill will be taking the reins (he already made his first move).
While Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle did not address the media yesterday during the press conference, they did sit down with Pittsburgh Tribune Columnist Dejan Kovacevic for an in depth interview. The interview touched on a lot of subjects and it was one of the rare occasions that we were let inside of the decision making process of the true powers that run the Pittsburgh Penguins. Mr. Kovacevic’s great interview can be found here.
There were a few really interesting comments from the interview and I am going to address some of those comments.
Mario Lemieux criticized the grit and character of this year’s Pittsburgh Penguins.
Lemieux: The grit, the character. Even on the special teams, you've got to have some guys in the playoffs with grit, with character, as well as speed.DK: Now, you always had that around you, that grit and character. No matter who you had to tick off, you made sure you had it. Lemieux: (Laughs) Like I've said before, it's a two-month tournament. To get to the end, you've got to go through a lot of adversity. DK: Now, when some hear that, they think right away of fighters. That's not what it's about, is it? Lemieux: No, just players who have some grit and character. We felt that was lacking this year.
As you know I am not a fan of the buzzwords grit and character. I don’t believe those kinds of things are very relevant when the player(s) who supposedly has them are not good at actually playing hockey. I think something that is misconstrued about my disinterest in those buzzwords is that I don’t find them important at all. I do find them important.
Grit/character + skill = most ideal situation you can have
Grit/character - skill = worst case scenario.
It is a fine line when talking about those kinds of attributes. The problem with finding players that combine their skill with grit/character is that they are usually never made available.
How do you get these kinds of players? Well, you probably have to draft them. What was the one thing that Ray Shero did more poorly than anything else during his tenure? Drafting.
Adam Gretz of SBNation put together a chart that chronicles Ray Shero’s history of 1st and 2nd round picks, it isn’t all that impressive. Yellow means that player played for the Penguins, blue means that player/pick was traded away, white is a player still with organization but has yet to play with Penguins, and red is a player who has been released/unsigned.
Grit and character weren’t the only things that Lemieux specifically targeted, speed was another part of the equation that was mentioned:
DK: OK, then, so what does this team look like to you going forward? And I know that'll ultimately be up to the new GM, but what does that look like to you in the context of this NHL with what you see around the league? Because you're not seeing as much obstruction as in the past. You're seeing teams come back from big deficits.Lemieux: Yeah. You need speed. Look at Montreal, the way they're built. They have some smaller forwards, but they're all speedy and they've got grit, and they've got character. That's probably what we'd like to have.
DK: Is that why a little guy like Brian Gibbons looked effective in these playoffs?
Lemieux: I think that's where the league is going now, with more speed. But of course, you need the grit and character along with the speed. If you have those, you've got a pretty good chance at being successful.
Lemieux referencing the Canadiens as an example of a team with speed and grit was encouraging. Montreal is considered a skill team that has speed to burn. Mostly all of their players have good puck skills and can skate. That is a great template for the Penguins moving forward. The Canadiens do not have a Craig Adams or a Tanner Glass (they do have a Doug Murray) skating amongst their forward grouping. They do have a Dale Weise on the 4th line who is giving them productive minutes and playoff overtime goals. They also have Danny Briere on their 4th line.
The Penguins used to have this model too, way back in 2009 when Pascal Dupuis and Miroslav Satan were on the Penguins 4th line.
One of the areas in which the Shero/Bylsma led Penguins have failed the most, if not the most, was taking advantage of entry level contracts of players who were capable of playing NHL minutes. The prime example of this would be Simon Despres, but there are other examples as well. Moving forward it does not seem like this will be the case:
Burkle: That's part of what we're talking about right now with the younger guys. You can look at the draft and say what we did or didn't do, but we've got forwards and D-men who we have drafted and didn't always take advantage of them or done a lot with them. So we have ended up with an older team. When we do see our younger guys, we see a lot more energy, a lot more of what we'd like to see in our game. So maybe those guys at the Garden were playing a little bit ahead of their ability. They made up with their energy.DK: We saw some of that in Columbus, too, right? It wasn't just about the city's excitement. They had Ryan Johansen, a lot of other young players, all who were really amped up just to be there.
Lemieux: They had that nice mix of older and younger players that you need in the playoffs. A lot of fresh legs.
Burkle: Frankly, the salary cap situation is going to drive that anyway. With a cap system, you can't just have a bunch of senior people on the team. You can't afford to.
DK: On that note, this team has been guilty, at least in my estimation of not giving its younger players a chance. I'm not going to paint Simon Despres as Bobby Orr, but he didn't get a chance. It's the regular season, you're on your way to 51 wins, and no one every found about the kid, you know?
Lemieux: Yeah.
Burkle: Agree with that 100 percent.
This is another encouraging sign moving forward. Older less skilled players will no longer be taking time from better or equally skilled players moving forward. The salary cap NHL is all about asset management, you need to take advantage of youthful speed on the cheap before you pay for their past successes in their UFA contracts. Every successful team in the NHL takes advantage of ELC’s.
For the past few years the Pittsburgh Penguins have been known for being a loosey goosey defensive team. They were a dumpster fire against the Flyers in 2012 and last year they were chasing their tails against the New York Islanders. To remedy some of these shortcomings Jacques Martin was brought in.
What we didn’t know is that Jacques Martin was NOT brought in by Shero or Bylsma, he was brought in by Lemieux and Burkle. The writing has been on the wall for the past year but nobody knew it other than the men who ran the team.
DK: What's the best way to describe how disappointed you guys are? I know how you felt about Ray as a GM and person. How disappointed must you be to have reached this point?Burkle: I think we looked hard at ourselves last year. We spent a lot of time sitting in this very room last year, trying to figure out what changes should we make, what should we do. And we made the decision to bring another coach in and have a look, see if we could be more flexible, try to adapt between how we were playing in the regular season and in the playoffs.
DK: Jacques Martin.
Burkle: Yes. And Ray made a strong argument for what he wanted to do, for the continuity he wanted, for extending the contracts, all the stuff you know about. I think the piece that was added, really by Mario, and that was embraced by Ray was to bring the other coach in and change the ability to adapt to situations. And if you look back at that today, in some ways, I wish we hadn't made that bet. Because that's another year. So if we're disappointed, it's that we lost a year to the change that we should have made already.
I had said earlier last week that the Penguins needed to know their decision about their front office/coaching moves before knowing how their season would end, it appears Lemieux and Burkle did, and they regret not pulling the trigger on the firings sooner. Shero attached his wagon to Dan Bylsma and the ownership group thought so much of Bylsma that they hired a guy to help him figure out how to make adjustments.
The optics of Dan Bylsma not being fired yesterday were/are strange, but make no bones about it, he will not be coaching the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2014-2015. How could he based on the criticisms that Lemieux and Burkle laid out in their interview yesterday?
Not playing younger players? Owner initiated decision to hire an outside coach to straighten out their approach to defense? Calling out the team’s character? Yeah, that guy isn’t coming back.
There are some huge decisions coming in the next two weeks (the time frame given for Penguins to hire their new GM) that will mold and shape this organization moving forward, but the thing that I take away from this situation is that Mario is still at the top of the pyramid and I can’t think of too many people I’d rather have in that position.
It is never an ideal situation when you have to fire your Cup winning general manager but the Penguins Stanley Cup window is still open and it is because ownership saw flaws in the process and have decided to act accordingly.
This could be the latest chapter in which Mario has saved the Penguins, again. He is rarely in the public spotlight but his best work usually comes when the franchise needs it most.
As a kid from the Mario generation, I wouldn’t make a habit of betting against the guy.
Thanks for reading!
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