Penguins/NHL
Is the Penguins
First-Round Pick in Play?
The San Jose Sharks for the second time this season gave the Pittsburgh Penguins of what should be a reality check again.
One team is an elite Stanley Cup Contender and one team in Pittsburgh just isn’t.
That continues to be the reality for this Penguins team.
San Jose flexed their muscles in being a faster, stronger, and deeper team than Pittsburgh. San Jose is so deep in some areas that Kris Letang would be a third pairing ‘Right D’ on their squad.
Pittsburgh entered this one winning four of five but it wasn’t a winning four out of five stretch that the organization should have felt great about. Pittsburgh has a lot of questions with the deadline three days away but a lot of their growing issues are issues that really can’t be addressed till the summer. They’ve hamstrung themselves against the cap with $80 million tied into 16 players for next season and potential trade assets with high cap hits are becoming depreciated assets moving forward.
Has Phil Kessel reached his expiration date in Pittsburgh? His decision making with the puck in high traffic area has been as bad as it can get for the last little while. Pittsburgh’s opportunity to sell high has sailed.
Patric Hornqvist has reached the point where you have to start wondering if he’s finally breaking down. There’s always a high risk in the type of deal he got at his age for a player who has to work as hard as he does to score goals and has taken so much punishment with his style of play. There’s signs the hands are gone.
Tanner Pearson’s game is such a mess he now feels the need to try to drop the gloves to stay in the lineup.
Penguins’ GM Jim Rutherford being all-in on Jack Johnson is also something else. The dead-weight on the roster continues to get greatly exposed against the upper echelon teams.
This sequence on the penalty kill is what makes Jack Johnson’s game so maddening.
Johnson’s defensive awareness/instincts are so below average it has him constantly making decisions like this where he’s leaving his area of the ice for no reason.
Here the Penguins are on the penalty kill and Johnson for some in-excusable reason darts towards the blueline and from there it was a snow-ball effect as Matt Cullen also follows suit in leaving his lane and then Chad Ruhwedel decides to put the exclamation point on the blooper field sequence.
Four Penguins caught on one side.
The fascinating thing to watch with the Penguins poor performance vs the Sharks is whether it will put the Penguins first round pick in play for a player or two they’re chasing. As Pittsburgh’s trade board is at 4-5 players, sources tell TIOPS Rutherford has been strongly advised by his staff to [hide] not put their first round pick in play for any of their remaining targets. But, no one close to the situation is 100% sure that will be the case.
Pittsburgh’s lack of second-round picks available in the next two drafts has been problematic in getting traction in talks for a couple targets who are expected to go for a second round pick/+ prospect.
— Little to no surprise in the Penguins organization that the Capitals acquired Carl Hagelin. Hagelin was on the Caps radar for weeks, — Buffalo, Montreal and Columbus — also looked into Hagelin, and the Penguins always knew the percentages were high Hagelin would end up back in the Eastern Conference by the deadline. There was a lot of disappointment in the organization, including the head coach, when Pittsburgh traded Hagelin, but the General Manager ultimately decided he needed to shakeup the room and make things uncomfortable for the group as Hagelin was an extremely popular player in the room.
Prior to completing the deal with Los Angeles in November, Pittsburgh had the option to move Hagelin to Buffalo for a conditional third round draft pick that could have turned into a second round pick, but Rutherford was only interested in a player-for-player type deal.
How comforting for the Penguins will it be if Carl Hagelin scores an overtime winner vs them in the playoffs when they’re paying a portion of his cap hit? [/hide]
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