No offense, no power play, no consistency in general … so when does this get ugly?
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20 Comments
The Penguins problem is the dreaded C words. Culture, Complacency, Commitment, Consistency and Coaching. Guess which one of those begets the others.
Sully still a good coach for a young team. His go go go system warrants young legs. Coach Q & Coach Sutter both multiple cup winners both had a expiration date with their teams, Sully is long past that date
Great episode
The stubbornness of this coaching staff will be the reason they miss the playoffs again.
Why don't we just stick Eller or DOC there? Like legit
I hate to say this but the last time they had a poor start like this they canned the coach, brought in Sully and won back to back cups. This goes back to last season. All they had to do was beat Chicago and they were in the play-offs. They wanted to win and Chicago wanted to lose. So what in the hell happened? I'm not sure what's going on but we all know that if it doesn't change soon there will be changes and I think we know what one of them will be. It's a shame for this to be happening in the final phase of Crosby's career. I had high hopes for this team yet so far they haven't shown much of anything. I'm hoping that it's just getting all the new moving parts to develop the chemistry but that hole that their digging is getting deeper all the time. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but I'll tell you they are starting to cramp.
If he hadn’t won two Cups, Sullivan would have been gone two years ago. This team has had Cup nostalgia for too long. It kept us from moving on from Malkin and/or Letang when they would have had value and could have brought us some young talent. I mean, c’mon, this is a team that brought back Nick Bonino last year! Dubas doesn’t have the baggage of two Cups and so it’s time to make the hard changes and that means Sullivan has to go so we get someone who will do what is needed such as sitting Carter and putting someone in front of the other team’s goalie.
DK, could you ever see DOC being a net front presence? He looks like a player that doesn’t mind going there and obviously has good luck retrieval skills. I realize that’s similar to asking Sullivan to jump over the moon while dunking a basketball.
uh……….at least 2 off-season's ago.
I feel like I'm stuck in last year. Same problems..
Have a great day today DK
Does the team have a sports psychologist on staff? Cause the Pens are a collective head case I think.
You're pretty spot on DK, but I highly disagree with your assessment that the 4th line is where you store the PKers. That's not how our 4th line operated when we won B2B cups. They were massively grindy. I can think back to so many times during those seasons where we were on tilt and our 4th line was able to drive possession in the offensive zone – even to allow Sid or a winger or two change over the boards to have scoring chances. Hell, our 4th line would even muck and grind some ugly goals in. To get back to where we want to be we have to make our 4th line an asset again. NOT just a place to store our PKers. That's the problem. Jeff Carter has removed the ability to have our 4th line be an asset for this team.
Sully IS the problem,his stubborness will be his downfall…Dubas goes out and gets him a Ferrari (Karlsson) and Sully wants to put it in the garage instead of running the damn thing the way it was built to run…Maybe you could get someone with real net front prescence in a Guentzel trade…
DK, as someone who’s played competitive hockey for 18 years and is currently playing in college at Duquesne University, I will say it is very easy/common for a team to be fired up and ready to play a team like the Avalanche, and then take the foot off the gas for a “lesser” team. It’s 1000% subconscious however. It’s easier to “get up” for the games against bigger opponents. The players and coaches are responsible for making sure they can “get up” for every game. I’ll cut them a little bit of slack because this mindset is extremely difficult to achieve, but something has to change. I’m going to the game tonight, hoping for a better result!
I think this is already ugly. Sully just can't get this team to play the grind game with any level of competency. The Pens can beat teams like COL when it's skill vs skill, but they can't beat the bottom feeders.
I'm not for getting rid of Sully because I do think he's the right guy for a rebuild, so maybe we should start thinking that way.
Gundogan left Man City for Barcelona and was pissed about losing to Real Madrid over the weekend. He slammed his new team for their attitude after the loss. The Pens have no one on the team who would speak up like this. They only have leaders who lead by example, but not vocal leaders who are not afraid to call out teammates. It's also sad that the Pens kiss Carter's butt by playing him, but won't put Karlsson front and center. He should be the new sheriff in town.
It's gonna be a long season. And just think, next year they will be even older and slower.
IMHO the pens play well against teams built and play a system similar to them and play blah defensively. they have problems with bigger, defensive and physical teams.
I see goaltending as a problem it looks like every oposing goalie is a star and when they shoot on our net it has a 50/50 chance to go in