Penguins 3, Canadiens 1: Sidney Crosby Is Alive And Well, Folks

A resurgent Crosby led the Pens to a 2-game win streak over crappy teams.

The Pens beat the Canadiens 3-1 Saturday night for their second straight win, and now sit at 5-7-1 on the season. Some thoughts on where they stand as we prepare to turn back the clocks:

1. The Penguins can only beat bad teams

The Penguins have five wins this year: against Montreal (twice), Anaheim, Buffalo, and Detroit. All four of those teams missed the playoffs last year. They’ve lost every game they’ve played against teams that did make the playoffs last year: Rangers, Toronto, Carolina, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver, plus two more losses against non playoff teams from last year that are off to good starts in Calgary and Minnesota.

Will the Penguins ever actually beat a good team this season? NHL results are usually pretty wonky, with even non-playoff teams winning their fair share of random regular season games against contenders. But so far, the Pens have held weirdly consistent to this trend. Their next 4 games are against playoff teams from last year (though the first one is against the struggling, extremely-injured Islanders.) If the pattern continues, things might look really bad a week from now.

Want to find out if your team’s good or not? Play the Pens!

2. Crosby’s back (again)

Rather than paraphrase my thoughts on Crosby’s struggles for the half dozenth time this year, I’ll just copy-paste what I wrote after the Jets game two weeks ago:

Crosby has looked like this for stretches in the past. Around the trade deadline last year and right after, while the Pens were really plummeting, Crosby went cold; from February 29th to March 22nd, in 13 games, he scored 1 goal and had 6 assists, and the Pens lost 10 of 13 games (beating San Jose, Detroit and Columbus.) Yes that’s an arbitrary cutoff point, roughly a month surrounding the trade deadline while Guentzel was out, but I remember thinking at the time that with Guentzel injured then traded, Crosby was either medium checked-out or just flat-out struggling down the stretch. But in the last 13 games of the season, playing mostly with O’Connor and Rust, he had 9 goals and 16 assists — back up to nearly two points per game.

I mention these arbitrary periods just to say, there’ve been times in the past where Crosby’s line suddenly isn’t dominating, and while we might strain for some explanation for it — is he hurt? Does he miss Guentzel? — he can just as quickly snap right back into looking like Sidney Crosby.

Crosby now has 4 goals and 3 assists in his last 3 games. I don’t think anyone was “overreacting” to his poor early start — he was playing very badly. And sure, getting stuck with Anthony Beauvillier, Drew O’Connor, and a not-100% Bryan Rust probably didn’t help. But he’s been dominant in the very recent past with comparable wingers (including literally with O’Connor and Rust.) He just flat-out wasn’t playing well.

The reality is, Crosby is 37, and it’s damn near impossible to play his style of bodying people off the puck, winning every wall battle & puck battle, and dominating down low and in front of the net for 82 uninterrupted regular season games. So sometimes, he just doesn’t look good for a while. Then out of nowhere, he looks good again. Yes, to an extent, this happens to all players, but I don’t think it’s the same as someone playing consistently well and just not getting the bounces then suddenly having everything go in and seeming like they “snapped out of it.” I just think he has to pick and choose his spots a bit these days, and when Crosby isn’t “Crosby,” it’s exceedingly obvious.

3. Are any of the Pens’ UFAs going to increase their trade values?

A huge part of the Pens’ rebuilding plan this season is going to be dealing any of their pending free agents that anyone wants at the trade deadline for whatever they can get. They have so many guys that they’ll potentially be looking to move — Pettersson, O’Connor, Eller, Puljujarvi, Beauvillier, Grzelcyk, and Glass, plus players with term if anyone else wants them (Rakell, Hayes, Acciari etc.) — that it was reasonable to expect one or two of those guys to play better than expected, assemble an impressive-looking statline, and end up getting traded for a better return than people expected heading into the season.

There’s still a ton of season left, but right now, it’s hard to see any of those guys being a hot commodity. Pettersson will fetch a return for sure, but I don’t think he’s generated the type of “buzz” to push him into 1st round pick territory. Eller’s off to a solid start too with 4 goals and 3 assists, so he could head into the deadline with, say, 15 goals along with his reputation as a good defensive center, which will also be worth something to some team (a 3rd or maybe a 2nd.) But right now, it’s hard to see any of the rest returning anything more than a late round pick, if anything.

Ideally, someone like O’Connor gets hot like he did at the end of last year and pushes himself back into “2nd round pick” territory. But everyone else on that UFA list seems just as likely to get waived as to fetch even a 4th back. Although, Rakell has had a solid start, and if he plays well enough to get traded anywhere for anything, that’d be a huge win (no offense to him, it’s just not a contract the Pens need.)

4. A quick note on Rutger McGroarty

Rutger McGroarty has 0 goals and 1 assist in 6 games so far for the Wilkes-Barre Penguins. I’m not trying to shade him nor to pretend that I’ve actually scouted his games this year or anything, but it’s another of the billion reminders we get every season that transitioning into pro level hockey is extremely hard, even for accomplished 20-year-old college players.

I think we’re so used to seeing NFL 1st and 2nd round picks come into the league and reliably become one of a team’s best players by the end of their first year that sometimes fans have warped expectations for how quickly even top prospects can make an impact in the NHL. I expect McGroarty to be in the NHL before the end of this season, and for his game to continue trending upwards. But if people think he’d be lighting up the league if he were playing in place of Anthony Beauvillier or Kevin Hayes, and only isn’t because Mike Sullivan “hates young players,” then they don’t have a realistic understanding of what hockey prospects’ trajectories typically look like.

Granted, it’s easy for Pens fans to be spoiled about this after seeing what Crosby and Malkin did immediately then watching Guentzel and Rust jump from unheralded random mid-round guys to nearly immediate impact top line forwards.

5. The Canadiens probably aren’t going anywhere with their current head coach (sound familiar?)

I loved Martin St. Louis as a player and was excited when Montreal gave him a shot as their head coach — he makes a lot of specific, extremely on-point observations, and obviously has unique insight into how to play the game as a small but super-skilled player, which aligns well with some of Montreal’s top talents. But this is the start of his third full season as coach of the Canadiens (an eternity in NHL years — he’s the fifth-longest tenured coach in the league already!!) and even for a young team, they’re not making any progress.

Montreal is by some measures the worst defensive team in the NHL this season, and they’re the worst overall 5-on-5 team this season by expected goals-for %. Unless something changes soon, they’re trending towards another bottom-of-the-league finish. Which forces them to ask an awkward question: what’s more likely, Montreal suddenly gets it together in the next year or two with St. Louis at the helm, or they’ll need a new coach to take that “next step?” As cutthroat as it is to fire and re-fire coaches every couple seasons if things don’t turn around, it’s just very rare to see an NHL team play poorly under a head coach for a few years in a row, then suddenly “get it together” with that same coach still at the helm. The Avalanche were terrible in Jared Bednar’s first season. Barry Trotz coached Nashville through a bunch of crappy years before they became a playoff staple (if not a true contender.) Lindy Ruff had some wild ups and downs in his tenures in Buffalo and New Jersey. But the list of coaches who had multiple bad seasons with a team, stayed there, then the team suddenly got good with them still as the head coach is extremely rare.

Anyway, I already wrote about my thoughts on firing Mike Sullivan, but whether or not they do it this season, the Penguins just aren’t going to be contenders again with him as their head coach. He very well could go somewhere else and have lots of success. But it is very, very difficult to picture a coach coaching a team through a full tank year where defensive structure and wins don’t really mean much, then to suddenly snap the team back to attention in a future season and turn them into a contender.