Ragamuffin Gunner
Lost in the Flood
They'll go nowhere with Sully behind the bench. 6 years of failure.
Loser.
Loser.
It's going to come down to the final day, Pens will require 1 or 2 teams to lose out, it won't happen, and they'll miss by 1-2 pts again.
Hard to tell. Bunting has played really well since coming to Pittsburgh so it's a bit of a wash.With Jake Guentzel, would you guys have made the playoffs ?
Pens are a playoff team but with coaching failures to address the PP
Well the distinction is that the special teams coach who specifically designs and implements the powerplay, Todd Reirden, was clearly lackluster and this issue was never addressed by the organization. I think it's pretty reasonable to say a team that was 1-3 points out of playoffs would have easily been in had they been better than #31 in the Powerplay.Why is 5v5 play on the players and PP is on the coaches?
What is the distinction there?
Don't the coaches design 5v5 play as well?
With Jake Guentzel, would you guys have made the playoffs ?
It’s Todd Rierdon. But the Pens have fired assistants out from under Sullivan before, and kept the big man. And like Exile said, it’s not a vacuum where each coach has some silo. Sullivan is working every day in that environment.Is Sullivan responsible for the power play or is it one of the assistants?
They had Guentzel for 50 games, and were a worse team for points %. On top of that, acquiring Bunting brought their second line to life and was the only reason they were close.With Jake Guentzel, would you guys have made the playoffs ?
If you take out the 18 months where they won 2 cups (more credit goes to JR for tweeking the roster), and include his time at Boston............... Maybe the most overrated coach of all time in hockey.They'll go nowhere with Sully behind the bench. 6 years of failure.
Loser.
Dubas needs a complete collapse to justify a Sully firing. Give it another year.Has Dubas already given his endorsement to Sully for next season?
He kept backing Keefe after every playoff failure, would be interesting to see if he's going to remain loyal to a coach that every Pens fan seems tired of defending.
Would you trust an unqualified analytics dweeb to hire a new coach? Whoever Dubas hires is likely to be even worse.Has Dubas already given his endorsement to Sully for next season?
He kept backing Keefe after every playoff failure, would be interesting to see if he's going to remain loyal to a coach that every Pens fan seems tired of defending.
Well, you take away the cups he probably doesn't get rated as well as he is and isn't still coaching the team....so, no don't think he'd be in that most overrated category.If you take out the 18 months where they won 2 cups (more credit goes to JR for tweeking the roster), and include his time at Boston............... Maybe the most overrated coach of all time in hockey.
Would you trust an unqualified analytics dweeb to hire a new coach? Whoever Dubas hires is likely to be even worse.
Dubas needs a complete collapse to justify a Sully firing. Give it another year.
That comes down to ownership prioritizing winning over friendship/whatever hero worship they engage in. They dont.If they had even a league average powerplay they’d have comfortably made the playoffs in the East.
Whoever ran the powerplay should be out of a job.
They might have been able to make the playoffs if Dubas had had the sense to hire a qualified GM instead of further handicapping the team with his incompetence. They now have even less assets, another bad contract for a defenceman who can't play defence, and a President of Hockey ops who lacks about understanding of the sport. They're in deep, deep trouble unless ownership fixes their mistake and fires Dubas before he's allowed to do even more damage.
However, Sullivan had shown he's capable of doing the job. Dubas has never shown any sign that he's qualified to work in hockey ops anywhere he's gone. He made the same mistake in trading for Barrie and extending Rielly; he simply does not understand that defencemen need to be capable of playing like NHLers in their own end.That comes down to ownership prioritizing winning over friendship/whatever hero worship they engage in. They dont.
People can come in here and cry about Dubas all they want. On paper the team was better than 2022/23. Better depth. Better goaltending, even if that improvement was from the backup position, That should've translated to more wins. Speaking of which...
Acquiring Karlsson (and moving out a bunch of bad assets in the process) was about rolling the dice and trying to improve the team with another gamebreaker. And for the first 25ish games of the season, the partnership he formed with Pettersson was statistically excellent, and looked like it had been together for years. And then it was broken up because, admittedly bad signing, Ryan Graves looked like a disaster.
The incredible hurry to blame Kyle Dubas for everything, when there are far more obvious culprits, that have been failing for years is insane. He deserves blame for plenty. The line "if you dont have a Sullivan, you're out looking for a sullivan" is cringeworthy. But he showed up one year ago. This team has shown continual decline over the course of three GM tenures, all of whom have been outlived by the head coach. There's a pretty obvious common denominator there.
Gonna be wild.Same as last summer. They gonna try and compete.
Would you trust an unqualified analytics dweeb to hire a new coach? Whoever Dubas hires is likely to be even worse.
Would you trust an unqualified analytics dweeb to hire a new coach? Whoever Dubas hires is likely to be even worse.