Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Shayna Goldman put together in depth previews every year, and they don’t like the chances for the Penguins this season. They are projecting Pittsburgh to finish in 30th place, and last in the Eastern Conference, with 74 points in the 2025-26 season. The whole thing is worth a read, as […]
Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Shayna Goldman put together in depth previews every year, and they don’t like the chances for the Penguins this season. They are projecting Pittsburgh to finish in 30th place, and last in the Eastern Conference, with 74 points in the 2025-26 season.
The whole thing is worth a read, as usual it’s well-supported and offers insightful information on how they project it will play out.
Will it be accurate though?
The Pens have some areas to potentially exceed expectations, if only since the bar is set so low. It’s projected, for instance, that Pittsburgh will have the 32nd ranked defense. You might recall that there are 32 NHL teams, so that’s pretty bad. It got there by projecting big roles for bad players in Matt Dumba, Connor Clifton and Ryan Graves with no input from youngsters like Owen Pickering and Harrison Brunicke.
It’s fair to be skeptical that an NHL team truly will be giving roster spots on merit and not more broad influences like contracts and deferring to veterans factoring into roster decisions as they always will to some degree. At the same time, it would be for the best if players like Pickering and Brunicke cause the Pens to outright waive or at least bench players like Graves and Dumba. Will it happen? Maybe not, especially within the next week or two to get to such drastic conclusions. It’s also worth pointing out the hope and assumption that the young players are actually ready and good to go for the NHL level might not be right either. That’s a big breaking point though, and chance for the Pens to get better – they’ll need young options to play well. First they have to get into the lineup. Dropping veterans should serve as addition by subtraction.
Another area where Pittsburgh could exceed expectations this season is in the net. The Athletic has the Pens with the 31st best goaltending, and truth be told, it’s not like you can knock that projection too much. It could well end up being accurate. Then again, with goaltending, who knows what will happen in the next six or seven months. Unpredictable outcomes and swings from good to bad performances and bad to good performances happen all the time in the NHL. It’s not much to bank on the hope that Tristan Jarry reverses a fairly long slide the past couple of years or that Arturs Silovs or Joel Blomqvist emerges as a quality NHL option, but “you never know” is a decent enough hope when it comes to goaltending. That defense might not help much, then again, maybe the coaching or strategical freshening of philosophies will help more than is being forecasted.
Key thought:
That’s not to say that an opening-night first line of Crosby centering Rust and Rakell is a mistake; far from it, in fact, given what we heard from Crosby and Brisson as the offseason wound down. Starting the season in white-flag mode would’ve been destructive and disrespectful. It does, however, illustrate the fundamental issue facing the Penguins — doing right by Crosby, keeping him in the mix permanently and maximizing the rebuild is a complicated, potentially conflicting set of goals. Scorching the earth would be bad; finishing 25th in the league, where the odds of landing the first overall pick drop from 25.5 percent to 6.5, would be bad, too.
How long to hang onto players like Rickard Rakell and Bryan Rust, and how the fallout might affect Sidney Crosby, will be one of the over-arching stories of the Pens’ season. This preview says that a Western Conference source indicated Dubas is sticking with a price of three good assets for either Rust or Rakell, a price that no one has wanted to meet yet. Whether Dubas or another team blinks first will be an interesting development to track, but for now it’s beneficial to the Pens to hold a strong line.
Towards the end is a fascinating thought about “scorching the earth” and tearing down around Crosby in order to improve draft odds. Under the current NHL odds, only the three-worst teams have a double-digit chance of winning the first overall pick. Unless a team finishes dead last, they have at best a 13.5% of winning the first pick, and even for a last place team they have a much better chance of picking third overall (55.5%) than they do to be awarded the top pick (25.5%). Granted, in simple terms the worse the record, the better the pick and better of prospects to choose from, but that doesn’t change the math that the odds of landing the first overall pick are pretty poor regardless of finishing position.
At the same time, it’s true that the Penguins are in a contradictory place right now when it comes to fulfilling Crosby’s desire to compete in the short-term while being more focused on the longer-term when he won’t be around.
Across the broad view of the league, this outlook could be common among the Penguins. Not much will be expected from them, which will make the start of the season particularly important to create momentum and build the belief that they can be competitive. If not, and projections like this settle in as accurate, it’s going to be a long winter in Pittsburgh.
Category: General Sports
