Perspective: They’re Still Just Kids

So, in order to put the end of the 2009-10 season for the Pittsburgh Penguins in perspective, it’s time for a fill-in-the-blank quiz.

Question 1: How many of the age 26-and-under players on the 2009-10 Pittsburgh Penguins roster have never missed the playoffs in a full NHL season? Bonus: Name those players, and do the math to tell me what percentage of a game-night NHL roster those players are.

Answer: Seven

Bonus Answer: If we are considering a full NHL season to be no time spent in the minors at all, Evgeni Malkin, Jordan Staal, Tyler Kennedy, Kristopher Letang, Alex Goligoski, and yes, indeed, Marc-Andre Fleury and Max Talbot have never missed the NHL playoffs in their NHL careers. Thirty-five percent of the 2009-10 Penguins, on game-night, had no clue what it’s like not to be a member of playoff team. (This percentage shifts to twenty-five percent if we consider the 2005-06 season where Fleury and Talbot played partial NHL seasons. Note this “reduced” percentage is still one-quarter of a game-night roster.)


Question 2: How many of the age 26-and-under players on the 2009-10 Pittsburgh Penguins roster, until the 2009-10 season, have always played on an NHL team that plays into June? Bonus: Name those players, and tell me what percentage of a game-night NHL roster those players are.

Answer: Three

Bonus Answer: Kris Letang, Tyler Kennedy, and Alex Goligoski, until 2010, had no clue what it was like to have summer start in the month of May. Summer for these players, when on the NHL roster, has always begun after the Cup has been raised in June. That’s fifteen percent of a game-night roster that, until May 12, 2010, had no concept of how an NHL season could not last through June.


Question 3: Prior to the 2009-10 NHL season, how many of the age 26-and-under players on the 2009-10 Pittsburgh Penguins have never before lost an NHL playoff series they were expected to win? Bonus: Name those players, and tell me what percentage of the game-night roster they comprised in the 2010 postseason.

Answer: Eight

Bonus Answer: Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Jordan Staal, Marc-Andre Fleury, and Maxime Talbot were not universally expected to beat the Ottawa Senators in the first foray into the NHL postseason in 2007. Those five players, along with Tyler Kennedy and Kris Letang, were not expected to beat the Detroit Red Wings in the 2008 Cup Finals, either. Until the 2010 postseason, those seven players and Alex Goligoski didn’t have a clue about playing on an NHL team that loses a series it expects to win. Their first experience with failing to meet expectations, failing to win when they were universally expected to win, came only when the seconds clicked off the clock and the Montreal Canadiens assured the Penguins had no chance to be Eastern Conference champions for the third consecutive year. Oh, and those eight players comprised, during the 2010 playoffs, forty percent of Pittsburgh’s game-day roster.


Question 4: How many of the 26-and-under players on the 2009-10 Pittsburgh Penguins would you guess expected to advance, as they’ve become accustomed, to the Cup Finals in 2010?

Answer: There were 8 26-and-under players on the team, and 100% of them no doubt expected, once again, to be playing for hockey’s holy grail in June 2010. Take a glance at the answers to questions one to three above and you’ll no doubt fairly easily discern how and why those players came to hold and expect to meet such expectations.


Question 5: How many of the 26-and-under players on the 2009-10 Pittsburgh Penguins already have their names on the Stanley Cup? How many of them, when they retire, will always come with the label of “champion” and how many of them will always be appealing to other teams due to their “championship experience”?

Answer: All 8 of the 26-and-under players played a role on the 2009 Cup champion team, and some players played significant roles. The 2009 team wins the Cup sans none of those players (Goligoski had to play when Gonchar was injured, remember) and while they only have a ring for one hand at the moment, they still have a ring. They’ve won.


With all of this winning, of course, came the 2010 disappointment of the players, of the franchise itself, and of the fans. Because, you see, having gloriously delivered on hopes and dreams and expectations that were, for most of us, still close to “eventually” winning than winning “absolutely right now” in the 2009 season, an expectation arose around the core players that were still, gloriously, the age of kids, albeit at last all kids able to drink legally in the States. The kids, no longer children but forever champions, were expected to win. Year after year after year. The expectations had morphed from “win eventually” to “you have won; this is now the expectation.”

Cup or bust, not merely so to speak, but in reality.

Perhaps, however, we should examine another series of questions to see if, truly, we can put some further perspective around the Penguins’ 2010 postseason failure.


Question: How many minutes—or, er, games--did a 23-year-old Alex Goligoski play in the Penguins’ run to the 2009 Stanley Cup? How many minutes—er, games, did a 24-year-old Goligoski play in the Penguins’ abbreviated 2010 season?

Answer: Alex Goligoski played in two games in the 2009 run to the Stanley Cup and averaged 10 minutes on the ice per game. He served as the team’s seventh defenseman. Alex Goligoski played in 13 games in the 2010 postseason and averaged 20 minutes on the ice per game.


Question: What was a just-turned 22-year-old Kris Letang’s role (and approximate average minutes per game) on the 2009 Stanley Cup championship team? What was a just-turned 23-year-old Kris Letang’s role on the 2010 postseason Penguins?

Answer: Letang manned the point on the number one power play unit in 2009, but saw little time against the opposition’s best players and was rarely on the ice to defend a 1-goal lead. In 2010, Letang continued to man the point on the number one power play unit, but he was the defenseman on the ice, often, to protect a 1-goal lead, and he and his partner were (unlike the previous year) often on the ice against some of the opponent’s hottest scorers. He averaged 19 minutes per game in 2009; by 2010, his 23 minutes average on ice per game included time on the penalty kill (nonexistent in 2009) and his 2010 role was closer to #1 defenseman than to his 2009 part of young, promising power play specialist playing mostly protected minutes.


Question: (Actually, a series of questions pertaining to Evgeni Malkin) How old was Evgeni Malkin when he won the Art Ross Trophy and Conn Smythe Trophy, and who were his linemates in the 2009 postseason? How old was Evgeni Malkin when his point total dropped off in the 2009-10 regular season, and who were Malkin’s linemates in the 2009-10 regular season and postseason?


Answer: Malkin was 22 years old when he won the Art Ross Trophy and Conn Smythe Trophy. His linemates, for most of the year, were Petr Sykora and Ruslan Fedotenko. Max Talbot became his linemate, along with Fedotenko, in the 2009 postseason. At age 23, Malkin had a mish-mash of linemates in the regular season and postseason, sometimes Fedotenko, but never even a player close to “Sykora” or “Max Talbot 2009 postseason” level of scoring.


Question: (Actually, a series of questions about Marc-Andre Fleury) How old was Marc-Andre Fleury when he won the Cup in 2009? How old was Marc-Andre Fleury when he was pulled from Game 7 of the Montreal series in 2010? Respectively, how many regular season and playoff games has Fleury won?


Answer: Fleury was 24 when he won the Cup and 25 when he was pulled from Game 7 against the Canadiens in 2010. Fleury has won 148 regular season games and, in 3 postseason appearances, has won 38 games.


Question: Who led the NHL in slashing penalties in the 2010 regular season?
Who took an inadvertent (what some would also say was a “terrible call”) penalty a few seconds into Game 7 against the Canadiens? Who had over 100 of mostly “unnecessary” penalty minutes in the 2010 regular season and led the league in high-sticking penalties?

Answer: While no one in Pittsburgh wants to admit that Sidney Crosby isn’t perfect, fact of the matter is, Crosby, at times, is still a kid. He’s come a long way in channeling his emotions, but those emotions can still get the best of him on occasion (much less frequent than in prior years, but it still happens). Speaking of emotions getting the best of an elite player, Evgeni Malkin was the player with over 100 penalty minutes and who led the circuit in high-sticking penalties this season.


If you take a gander at the questions above, a few things—er, “themes”—no doubt stand out. You can’t help but notice that none of the players played as well in the 2010 postseason as he did in the 2009 postseason. And you can’t help but notice, too, for some of the players, they, still kids, experienced new things, much to their—and yes, the franchise’s and the fans’—pain:

~There was Kris Letang playing like he did in Game 5 against the Canadiens; a two-way stalwart who looked every bit like the #1 defenseman at both ends of the ice the Penguins needed him to be this postseason. And then there were the awful moments of Letang looking more like regular season Mike Green (scoring goals but not exactly lighting the world on fire in his own zone) or of regular season Letang (missing the net).

~There was Alex Goligoski playing full-time in the postseason, learning about the night-in, night-out rigors of the NHL playoffs.

~There were Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby, against the Canadiens, struggling to score, not consistently meshing with linemates, failing to take over games as they’d alternated doing the previous spring.

~There was the struggle of Malkin throughout the regular season and occasionally in the postseason to control his emotions, and though Crosby’s come a long way since age eighteen, there was the reminder, too, that even at 22, there’s still more emotional development to come in terms of positively controlling his emotions.

~There was Marc-Andre Fleury fighting the puck, being more “off” his game than “on” and not coming up with the big save he so regularly came up with (despite, yes, the soft goals and they were still there) back in 2009.

~There were the “young” role players, Talbot and Kennedy, so critical to the team’s 2009 run, scoring game-winning goals, not able to find that spark and that magic in the same way in the 2010 postseason.

~There was Staal’s quick comeback from surgery, but there was also a third line that never caught fire as it had in the 2009 postseason.


The overall twin themes that stood out were twofold: “They weren’t as good as last year, and they weren’t good enough.”

Yes. But here’s the thing. Take a gander, again, at their ages.
Seriously. Are not teams featuring a #1 defenseman in his prime, rather than one learning on the job, much more likely to play in the Cup Finals? (The Cup champion Penguins of 2009 and Cup champion Red Wings of 2008, along with Sergei Gonchar and Nicklas Lidstrom, say hello, not to mention the Cup champion Anaheim Ducks of 2007 and their two-top defensemen of Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger .)

Are not teams whose superstars, who have to be the center of attention (literally), more likely to win when those centers have linemates—not necessarily superstars—but linemates with whom they mesh, who can read the play, who can also play a key role on that line, including scoring a timely goal here or there?

Seriously. While hockey is undoubtedly a young men’s game, aren’t all these players still—for the next few seasons, anyhow—young men? Aren’t some of them still rightfully classified as “kids”?

Can we expect Crosby and Malkin to mature in terms of channeling their emotions? Can we expect Letang and Goligoski to understand the NHL game better by having gotten—however painfully it came—the experience they got this postseason? Should we not expect a still, by any standard, young goaltender to continually mature in terms of focus and concentration? Should we expect a 21-year-old already nominated as the league’s best defensive forward to continue to develop his two-way game even more as he learns how capable he is at both ends of the ice? Should we not expect role players, more and more, to grow into those roles and understand them and play those roles to the best of their ability, which, as they learn the game, are going to increase?


Final Question: How many age 26-and-under players were on the roster of the 2009-10 Pittsburgh Penguins, and how many of those players will return for the 2010-11 season? Bonus: Name those players.

Final (and Bonus) Answer: Barring trades, 100% of the 26-and-under crowd is under contract for the 2010-11 season, and Crosby, Malkin, Staal, Fleury, Letang, Kennedy, Talbot, and Goligoski have already won one title.

And the final summation is not a question and answer, but a fact. Look at the ages of the players. Accept that, though they’d won once and we—and they—erroneously assumed they’d learn all they’d ever need to know about winning and would thus never lose again—that they had more lessons to learn.

But if you remember back to this picture?

And to this one ?

And then this one?

Didn’t they learn their lessons?

Will they learn their lesson, this season, in time for next season?

Who knows? One can’t give two young NHL defensemen the equivalent of three years of experience in a single season, and a general manager has got to work tricks with his salary cap to give his superstar centers wingers with whom they “mesh”, so to speak. Plus, there’s the fact that injuries come into play, but good health for Talbot and Kennedy, and, of course, for all the young “core” players, matters (and not facing a white-hot opposing goalie could also be a very good thing). Along with the fact that, yes, mental focus and concentration, and more emotional control, could no doubt help in the case of the penalties taken by the superstar centers (and yes, Malkin took them way more frequently than Crosby for anyone who thinks I’m saying the two are equivalent—I’m not), and if Jordan Staal could add to his game the ability to plant himself in front of the net on the power play on a consistent basis, the Penguins, suddenly, might need to worry less about a “big winger”.

But the fact remains this. The kids are former champions now, as an AP article so aptly put it. They’re no longer the reigning or defending champs.

They’re learning how it feels to lose when they were expected to win. And, hopefully, they’ve learned what it’s going to take to win again.

So, you see, if, after a rest, this summer is spent on….

Fleury sharpening his mental focus

Crosby and Malkin practicing emotional control (and yes, despite Malkin’s more regular season penalties), both players remain young men who still need to the learn the fine art of channeling their emotions in the most productive fashion possible

Kris Letang remembers, in a positive way, missing that net in Game 7 against Montreal by spending the summer harnessing his shot to the point that he consistently hits the net

Alex Goligoski adds muscle and works on his defensive game

Talbot and Kennedy make sure they’re rehabilitated from injuries to health…

Staal, already so good, so young, adding continuing to up his physical, offensive game….

Then, of course, much of the rest will depend on the general manager and the coaching staff providing the right pieces and putting those players in the best position to win. And injuries could come, other issues could come, but the thing is….

If I’m the Penguins’ marketing department, I don’t talk so much about getting back to where we were (climbing the mountaintop) as much as I focus on playing as who we are.

Kids who know expectations are sky-high, and kids who have learned, and are continuously learning and are going to have to keep learning and improving all the time, how to play out of their explosive talent at the highest level in the NHL, as everyone—because they know they’ve won once—lines up against them and conceives and dreams up ways to stop them from winning again.

Because they’re still kids. There’s still learning and development and growth to come. For the franchise and the fans, and for players who, for the first time ever, and for the first time in a long time, felt the sting of failing to expectations and of losing, let’s hope these lessons, in the words of an old Penguins’ video, “bear fruit in years to come”.

Hopefully next season. But maybe not until their number 1 defenseman is an in-his-prime stalwart and the GM and coach have figured out how to put the right players in place and get the best out of all their players by making sure their trio of centers all has linemates with whom they can perform at peak productivity.

But remember these kids here and then here?

That's still who they are. Great kids.

So, boys, play like it. See you in October, and hopefully, sometime again soon, where you belong. On the ice in June.