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Have we even reached the bottom yet? |
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It felt inevitable. When all the players who made sense for the Penguins to trade for get picked up you knew the Penguins were still going to make trades and you knew they probably weren’t going to be good. It didn’t even take 25 minutes from writing about firing Hextall to prevent a catastrophe for Hextall to go out and create exactly that. The Penguins had minimal margins to begin with and now they have basically none.
Hextall traded for Mikael Granlund who was a really good player at one point in time. He has a knack for this. Jeff Carter, Jeff Petry, and now Mikael Granlund were all really good players, seven years ago. The team shed Kasperi Kapanen, Teddy Blueger, and some of Brock McGinn’s cap hit so they had flexibility to trade. Just like that they spent 5M on a struggling asset. An asset who has another two years left on his contract.
Granlund doesn’t solve any of the Penguins perceived issues. He doesn’t fit the style of hockey Mike Sullivan likes to deploy. He’s expensive. He has term.
I’m not sure Hextall could have done worse than he has here. You have to ask the question. How much pain and suffering could they have avoided if they just gave Evan Rodrigues a 2M deal? He certainly wouldn’t have cured all the team’s bottom six issues, but he would have kept their cap structure in a place where the team still had options.
There’s no guarantee we’ve seen the bottom yet, either. The deadline isn’t until tomorrow. Hextall is technically still in charge.
He’s already tried really hard to trade Pettersson over the summer. It isn’t really that far fetched for him to try and trade his best left defenseman because he probably doesn’t think he is their best left defenseman. It really feels like Hextall is going to burn the place down before he is forcibly removed from his position.
It is going to be a what could have been vibe to these next few years. Sure, all of the Eastern Conference teams are in an arms race. The Penguins chances were never going to be great. They could have still put forth a quality product and showed some creativity in building the roster. Instead, they watched a buyer’s market with a lot of salary retention play out while they played full freight for a player who doesn’t help the team or the cap situation. It’s a real mess.
It would be tough to blame fans if they check out and put the Penguins on the back burner. The Ron Hextall era has been an uninspired and unmitigated mess with no direction. This is as close as it has felt to things really being over and they might be. It would take a real change of fortune for the team to earn their way back into the picture the next few years. The Penguins would need a real smart GM who is willing to use what limited draft capital they have on fixing the cap crunch. Then they’d have to get lucky on some acquisitions where they buy low and get an above average return on investment. It isn’t easy even if the person hired is up to the task. One realistic avenue to undo the Hextall damage is in the desert.
The Coyotes aren’t a real team. Throw them some draft picks (probably a 1st rounder) to eat the bad contracts. You have to hit the reset button. They have to hit the cap floor. This is less than ideal. It is also the reality of the situation Hextall has put this team in. It sucks.
There will probably be a blog later today when Hextall trades Pettersson or some other BS trade.
Thanks for reading!
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