The Pittsburgh Penguins’ Mantra: If You’re driving Over a Cliff, Drive Faster
Kyle Dubas is steering into the skid that helped get him hired in the first place.
It’s almost never advisable to read too much of anything into an NHL regular-season opener regarding where it suggests a particular team might be headed, but this season’s Penguins might yet prove to be an exception.
They showed us who they intend to be, it seemed, during Tuesday night’s 2023-24 debut, a come-from-ahead, 4-2 loss to Chicago.
Beyond that, they told us.
President of Hockey Operations Kyle Dubas announced for the world to hear in advance of another bad beat against another bad Blackhawks team (about as bad as the one that torpedoed the Pens’ season last April, except this one has Connor Bedard) the philosophical direction in which his Penguins planned to proceed.
It may yet be remembered as the Penguins’ Declaration of Intentions.
It was as passionate as it was expansive.
And it didn’t include the need for physicality, detail or defense.
“In trying to study and learn from the previous mistakes that I’ve made – and there have been plenty well-documented and there’ll be more – I think when you build your plan or you build your system out, you have to build it very thoroughly in a way that your team wants to be about,” Dubas maintained.
“When it comes to style of play, when I look back at my own mistakes or errors or trying to study them across the league and other sports, it’s when you have your system built out, and you’ve fallen a little bit short, and then you adapt it based on the team that’s won the last year and you don’t stand by your convictions and you don’t stick by your way of operating here.”
Translation: The Pens don’t plan to alter their course after missing the playoffs last season, after not having won a playoff series since the 2018 season.
Instead, they’re stepping on the gas.
“As ‘Sully’ (head coach Mike Sullivan) says, the DNA of the team is offense,” Dubas continued. “So, if we tried to flip that at this stage, it’s not really something that I believe in, and it’s not really something that the group in the locker room believes in and the group has been successful playing that way, and winning that way.
“I think the easy retort would be, well, they haven’t won of late. My view is that when it doesn’t work out and we fall short, it’s on me in this role to get us back to that point. I think the group here has had success in a certain way. I think that why this was a great fit for me and for our family was that my beliefs are very closely tethered to that.”
Kudos to Dubas for holding himself accountable in advance.
It’s possible even he knows deep down where this is eventually headed.
As for Sullivan, he used to insist “you can’t score your way to a championship.”
He used to abhor the thought of coaching a “high-risk team.”
Apparently, he’s pivoted.
The problem is, these aging Penguins aren’t good enough offensively to be as indifferent as they are defensively.
They’ll still be entertaining.
Certain players will pile up their share of points as the season progresses.
And fans who long to remain as starstruck as they used to be back in the day will still see stars on occasion if they squint hard enough.
But a mere one game into an alleged new era, headed by a new regime and bolstered by a host of new players, this team looks and sounds and is apparently very much committed to being the same old Penguins.
