It’s happening: Pittsburgh Penguins fans are dreaming about their next great team.
It’s hard to blame them. The Penguins haven’t won a playoff series since 2018; haven’t participated in the past two postseasons; have one of the oldest, slowest and least physically formidable rosters; and general manager Kyle Dubas appears to be prioritizing a rebuild over attempting to win big next season.
This column isn’t about Dubas’ plan. He’ll have to detail it first — and he hasn’t yet committed to the word “rebuild” — before we can assess his plan.
Rather, it’s about Penguins fans — specifically those raised on Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Sidney Crosby, and Evgeni Malkin — and preparing them for a sobering likelihood: There’s no guarantee the Penguins’ rebuild will go as well as the last one. It will require a lot of luck, and counting on luck isn’t a strategy.
The next great Penguins team is unlikely to feature a pair of Hart-and-Art Ross-winning forwards who are human Band-Aids for roster deficiencies and can carry franchises on their shoulders for a decade or more.
That’s not to suggest the Penguins can’t or won’t win the Stanley Cup without two transcendent superstars, but they never have — so the attempt would be novel.
Fans and media tend to fall in love with the idea of rebuilding. It doesn’t matter that most rebuilds fail. It doesn’t matter that a lot of luck is needed for a rebuild to work, even if there is a sound plan from management, enormous patience from ownership and full buy-in from supporters.
Maybe a rebuild’s appeal is the unknown of it all. Or perhaps it’s merely something to get excited about after things have gone stale.
The Penguins have been stale for a while now.
Some fans eagerly await two years from now, when Malkin’s contract expires and the yet-unspoken rebuild is projected to begin. There’s a thought that his contract is the problem and removing it from the salary-cap equation will somehow lead to a seismic shift for an organization that has been struck in neutral for the entirety of this decade.
Maybe. The Penguins, though, would need to be even more lucky for it to be that simple.
Malkin is perhaps the best example of how fortunate the Penguins were with their last rebuild. He is arguably the greatest No. 2 pick in league history, far from a consolation for losing the 2004 draft lottery, where the clear prize was Alex Ovechkin.
Say the Penguins, who had the league’s worst record, had held on to the No. 1 pick that season. Former GM Craig Patrick has said he would have chosen Malkin over Ovechkin, but that’s hard to believe.
It’s revisionist history to argue Penguins fans were salivating over the idea of Malkin coming to Pittsburgh at the end of a wretched 2003-04 season. Many were wearing Dynamo Moscow jerseys bearing Ovechkin’s name and No. 8 to Mellon Arena toward the end of that season. Penguins fans’ love for Malkin, a late riser among experts that draft year, developed only after the lottery ball didn’t bounce in their favor.
That worked out for the Penguins, didn’t it?
Malkin didn’t arrive for a couple of seasons, but once he did, he was instantly one of the best players in the world. By then — partly because they kept the best lottery odds coming out of the NHL lockout in 2005 for having not won the lottery the year prior — the Penguins already had the best player in Crosby.
By their second season together, Crosby and Malkin were already the best 1-2 center combo in hockey; Crosby had won an MVP and scoring title, and Malkin was about to finish second to Ovechkin for those awards.
Rare are the prospects that deliver as epically, especially early, as Crosby and Malkin. By year three, they were the top playoff scorers, teaming to score 29 goals and 67 points for a Stanley Cup champion.
Nobody needs to be told how the rest of their careers went. They’re on the short list of the greatest duos in NHL history, surpassing even the Penguins’ own Lemieux-Jagr tandem.
The Penguins have picked No. 1 three times. Each time, their pick produced a future Hall of Fame franchise stalwart: Lemieux (1984), Marc-Andre Fleury (2003) and Crosby (2005). None of the Penguins’ modern fortunes would’ve happened without those players, but players like those aren’t available in every draft.
It’s similarly unlikely that a prospect such as Jagr, widely viewed as the most talented prospect in 1990, will fall to the Penguins if their next rebuild fails to net them a top-three pick. That could happen, by the way — ask the Detroit Red Wings.
There wasn’t a lottery when Jagr became the fifth pick, and he lied to other interested GMs and scouts, telling them he would not come to North America to force his way to the Penguins and play with his idol, Lemieux.
The Penguins have come into an embarrassment of riches of game-changing, franchise-altering prospects when they were at their lowest. They openly tanked to get their hands on Lemieux. They wouldn’t have had a shot at Jagr if Lemieux’s back hadn’t gone wonky and submarined their 1989-90 season.
With Lemieux as a player/owner in the early 2000s, the Penguins — to their credit — publicly committed to a rebuild. Their first-round picks from 2000-06: Brooks Orpik, Colby Armstrong, Ryan Whitney, Fleury, Malkin, Crosby and Jordan Staal.
Crosby and Malkin became icons. Fleury became a beloved franchise goalie who made iconic saves in Game 7s. Orpik turned into a top-pairing defenseman. Staal delivered as one of the great third centers of the modern era. Armstrong and Whitney were solid regulars traded respectively in deals that delivered Marian Hossa, Pascal Dupuis and Chris Kunitz to the Penguins.
No wonder so many people are eager for a rebuild. They remember that run of brilliant drafting.
But was it more brilliant or fortunate?
Greg Malone was a great head scout. Even he concedes he has the hockey gods to thank for those picks. As he recently reminded me, “Players like that aren’t always there to take, and even then you have to develop them.”
“Everybody thinks if you have a high pick you’re going to get a player that can’t miss,” Malone said last month. “I’ve seen a lot more miss than hit. And I never had as many hit like that group — and they hit big.”
Let Malone’s words provide some perspective if nothing else.
The past is not a predictor. A glorious previous rebuild is no guarantee the next one will go as well, or even well at all.
A counter to this is that current prospects are better prepared to realize their potential than at any point before. Still, they don’t all become generational players like Crosby, or all-time greats like Malkin, and there isn’t as much patience these days for someone like Fleury, who needed to grow into his role as a franchise goalie.
The Penguins were lucky. They may be again whenever the impending rebuild leads to higher first-round picks.
Probable? Not really.
Think again about Lemieux, Jagr, Crosby and Malkin. They’re more than just the four greatest players in franchise history. They were prospects who exceeded enormous expectations. They formed dynamic duos but were also individual historic talents capable of carrying a franchise. They rose to the occasion on the biggest of stages. Those types of prospects are rare finds. The Penguins have had more than their share of incredible luck to find them.
And whichever prospects the Penguins do bet on when they presumably begin drafting high as part of a rebuild will face more pressure because of the huge shadows cast by those who came before them.
A Penguins rebuild is inevitable, and maybe the sooner the better. The last one was one of the best the NHL has known, and their followers would do well to remember they were lucky almost beyond compare.
(Photo of Evgeni Malkin: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
