Let's Go PENS!

[Turd Ferguson]

OK - so just Shero gone at this time - new GM will decide things

Enough of the F'n around....5 years of playoff colapses with this amount of talent doesn't cut it. Send the message now.

 

[Spike]

Enough of the F'n around....5 years of playoff colapses with this amount of talent doesn't cut it. Send the message now.

Mario sent the message - he'll dump the coaching decision on the new GM.

Protecting Sid from the "he got the coach fired" talk?

 

[Spike]

 

[Spike]

Gene Collier ‏@genecollier
Just asked Mario Lemieux if there was chance Dan Bylsma could keep his job: "Certainly," said #Penguins owner, "that why we didn't fire him"

 

[hook]

Gene Collier ‏@genecollier
Just asked Mario Lemieux if there was chance Dan Bylsma could keep his job: "Certainly," said #Penguins owner, "that why we didn't fire him"

I'm sorry, but I'm just not liking the direction this is going. I like Dan, but he should have been the first one canned. Sure, this team lacked grit and down and dirty guys, but the total over all chaos and lack of dicipline I saw from this team the last two months or so looked to be more a coaching issue than a GM issue.

 

[Spike]

Dejan Kovacevic ‏@Dejan_Kovacevic
I just sat with Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle in an office. Had free reign to ask anything. And did.

Dejan Kovacevic ‏@Dejan_Kovacevic
Bottom line: Lemieux and Burkle want new GM to have total say in how @Penguins look. Including choosing anyone from current hockey ops.

 

[Hollywood Bags]

Train wreck.

 

[Spike]

the innernets are asploding

 

[Spike]

Penguins owners Lemiuex and Burkle say Bylsma absolutely could remain coach

“That’s why we didn’t fire him (Bylsma),” Lemieux said. “He’s a good coach. You look at his record in the regular season, in the playoffs. If he was fired today, there’d be a lot of teams lined up for him"

oh myyyyyyyyyyyyy

 

[Spike]

Exclusive interview: Mario Lemieux, Ron Burkle

Just spent a half-hour meeting with Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle in a Consol Energy Center office. Only others in the room were David Morehouse, CEO, and Tom McMillan, VP of communications.

Keep refreshing, as I’m just going to keep updating the file as I type it out. The entire conversation was on the record.

DK: What’s the best way to describe what was announced today?

Burkle: Well, let’s start with this: We start here with a lot of great qualities. We’ve got a community that gives us a lot of support, the fans, the youth hockey, a lot of different areas that allow us to run to the cap if that’s the place we need to be. And we wake up every day with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. So we wake up in a pretty good place.

We aren’t happy to be in the top quartile. If you make it to this round, you’re in the top quartile. That’s good enough for some. It isn’t where we want to be. And as we looked at this team as a whole, the whole year and not Game 7, we don’t think we’ve got a team that’s got all the ingredients we’d need to have for a championship team. And all the things we’d expected to have for a championship team. So, to us, well before Game 7, we looked at how best we’d need to find those things …

Lemieux: The grit, the character. Even on the special teams, you’ve got to have some guys in the playoffs with grit, with character, as well as speed.

DK: Now, you always had that around you, that grit and character. No matter who you had to tick off, you made sure you had it.

Lemieux: (Laughs) Like I’ve said before, it’s a two-month tournament. To get to the end, you’ve got to go through a lot of adversity.

DK: Now, when some hear that, they think right away of fighters. That’s not what it’s about, is it?

Lemieux: No, just players who have some grit and character. We felt that was lacking this year.

Burkle: No matter how well we did this year, we didn’t have that. And it was something that had to be addressed.

DK: The root of any successful franchise is the draft. How big of a problem was the drafting?

Lemieux: It’s a problem. We’ve drafted well on defense. We’ve got some great prospects coming up, guys who are still in Wilkes-Barre, in juniors. We haven’t done as well at forward, obviously, but we’ve got some defensemen, some young guys we feel can step in over the next year or two.

DK: Why wouldn’t there have been a recognition earlier on that this team wasn’t tough? I mean, you could see in training camp that wasn’t the case.

Lemieux: (Shrugs)

DK: Yeah, me, neither.

Lemieux: That’s just the way the team was put together.

DK: Was there ever any edict from either of you, after the Matt Cooke mess, that the Penguins had to become this squeaky-clean team?

Burkle: We’ve read that. It’s not true.

DK: You know what I’m asking, right? This idea that because Mario spoke up about the Islanders a couple years ago that the Penguins had to become the role model?

Lemieux: No. Not at all.


http://blog.triblive.com/dejan-kovacevic/

 

[Spike]

DK: Was there ever any edict from either of you, after the Matt Cooke mess, that the Penguins had to become this squeaky-clean team?

Burkle: We’ve read that. It’s not true.

DK: You know what I’m asking, right? This idea that because Mario spoke up about the Islanders a couple years ago that the Penguins had to become the role model?

Lemieux: No. Not at all.

What was that all about?

 

[hamster]

What a long strange trip this day has been.

 

[USDA#1]

"We aren’t happy to be in the top quartile. If you make it to this round, you’re in the top quartile. That’s good enough for some. It isn’t where we want to be. And as we looked at this team as a whole, the whole year and not Game 7, we don’t think we’ve got a team that’s got all the ingredients we’d need to have for a championship team. And all the things we’d expected to have for a championship team. So, to us, well before Game 7, we looked at how best we’d need to find those things …"

Rizzo, iirc, said that Sid and Geno knew this to be the case months ago, and that's part of the reason the weren't 100% into this season.

 

[Spike]

https://twitter.com/genecollier/stat...64984952193024

#Penguins Lemieux on the notion of firing Bylsma, "Look at Detroit; they don't win the Cup every year, but Babcock is still coach."

 

[Spike]

Steigy..."the fans should be grateful we keep making the playoffs, and we aren't Florida"


....oh my.....oh my.

Steigy does say he's in favor of trading Fleury and getting rid of Orpik......the ground is trembling

 

[Steel G]

Steigy..."the fans should be grateful we keep making the playoffs, and we aren't Florida"

Funny he picked Florida, their last postseason series victory was against Mario and Co.

 

[Spike]

What a long strange trip this day has been.

Smoke em if you gottem

 

[Spike]

Go young legs - see ya next year


The #WBSPens line rushes in warmups: Sheary-Gibbons-Kobasew, Zolnierczyk-Megna-Zlobin, Payerl-Drazenovic-Kostopoulos, Uher-Sill-Farnham.

Defense pairings for #WBSPens in warmups: McNeill-Despres, Dumoulin-Mikkelson, Harrington-Goers. Harrison Ruopp will be a healthy scratch.

Pouliot isn't with the team yet it seems.

http://www.wbspenguins.com/#

---------------------

Kunitz/Neal/Letang/Orpik can be dealt - no more favorites

 

[Vader]

Rizzo, iirc, said that Sid and Geno knew this to be the case months ago, and that's part of the reason the weren't 100% into this season.

I don't understand this. IF Sid score any thing during the Rangers series they win easily. That puts you in the Conference finals. Then you have the Habs. They aren't the 80s Oilers and have just gone through a tough 7 game series with the Bruins. Again, if Sid and Geno are playing well that's a competitive series. Anything can happen in the finals. It isn't like they got swept in the first round.

 

[Spike]

Pierre McGuire to be next head coach?


We demand entertainment!

 

[Rod Farva]

Stan Savran is going off...calling Mario a chicken for dumping the coaching decision on the new GM

Well it is kind of ****** up to to leave DD hanging if he is in fact going to be fired. Which raises the obvious(and to me, disturbing) point that perhaps DD still has a shot at staying.

I'm sorry, but I'm just not liking the direction this is going. I like Dan, but he should have been the first one canned. Sure, this team lacked grit and down and dirty guys, but the total over all chaos and lack of dicipline I saw from this team the last two months or so looked to be more a coaching issue than a GM issue.

I'm fearful that maybe Sid has Mario's ear and more say in the day to day of this team than even I was giving him credit for having.

Steigy..."the fans should be grateful we keep making the playoffs, and we aren't Florida"


....oh my.....oh my.

Steigy does say he's in favor of trading Fleury and getting rid of Orpik......the ground is trembling

Bryzgalov is a ufa.....just sayin'.....maybe he could bring Mike Yeo with him.

 

[Spike]

Here we go...the rumor mill is off and running

Where did Ray Shero go wrong?

When Ray Shero took over as the Pittsburgh Penguins general manager in 2006, he had a golden opportunity. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin had been drafted in the previous two years, giving the team the foundation for a dynasty.

In 2008, Crosby and Malkin led Pittsburgh to the Stanley Cup Final. One year later, the Penguins won it all. They haven’t done it since, and Shero has been shown the door as a result.

What could Shero have done differently? Certainly, he made some good moves along the way. In recent years he traded for forwards James Neal, Chris Kunitz, and Pascal Dupuis, and signed them all to reasonable contracts. Each member of that trio has grown since joining the Penguins, giving them a formidable group of top-six forwards.

But what about their bottom two lines? Championship teams are known for their depth and that’s hard to get when you have $17.4 million annually ($18.2 million starting in 2014-15) of your cap hit going to two forwards, no matter how talented they might be.

That’s a problem the Chicago Blackhawks haven’t had to deal with. Yet. Like Pittsburgh, Chicago is built around two young superstars in Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, but that duo is costing the team just $12.6 million annually against the cap. Both are pending unrestricted free agents after the 2014-15 campaign, however.

What could Shero have done to prevent this problem? The bold move would have been to trade one of Malkin or Crosby — likely the former rather than latter. He could have practically dictated the price and built the offense around Crosby, while retaining enough cap flexibility to assemble a balanced group.

Or, he could’ve just drafted better. Since the 2008 draft, the Penguins haven’t selected a single player that has gone on to participate in at least 100 NHL games.

Using Chicago as a comparison again, the ‘Hawks have drafted three forwards since 2008 that have surpassed the 100-game mark: Andrew Shaw, Brandon Saad, and Marcus Kruger. Ben Smith is just shy with 95 regular-season contests — which is still more than any Penguins drafted player (Simon Despres, 85) has managed over that span.

All four of those Blackhawks were taken after the first round. Since 2008, the Penguins have just one non-first round pick that has played in at least 15 NHL games: Ben Hanowski, who’s no longer with the organization.

Then of course there’s the Penguins defense. It’s rare for any team to win the Cup without a superb blue line, and while Pittsburgh does have Kris Letang, its defense as a whole is somewhat less than superb.

Shero tried to address that by bringing in defensive defensemen, but his recent experiments — veterans Douglas Murray and then Rob Scuderi — haven’t produced the results he was hoping for. Ultimately, in both cases it might have been a matter of chasing after players that were past their primes.

The next Penguins general manager will have to decide if he wants to stay the course or do something bold. The depth problems in Pittsburgh aren’t going to get any easier to address given that Letang’s eight-year, $58 million contract is about to begin. Can this team stay competitive while giving more than $25 million annually to just three players?

Shero clearly thought they could. The next guy might disagree.

Related: Now is the time to explore trading Letang

http://prohockeytalk.nbcsports.com/2014/05/16/where-did-ray-shero-go-wrong/

 

[Rod Farva]

But what about their bottom two lines? Championship teams are known for their depth and that’s hard to get when you have $17.4 million annually ($18.2 million starting in 2014-15) of your cap hit going to two forwards, no matter how talented they might be.

That’s a problem the Chicago Blackhawks haven’t had to deal with. Yet. Like Pittsburgh, Chicago is built around two young superstars in Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, but that duo is costing the team just $12.6 million annually against the cap. Both are pending unrestricted free agents after the 2014-15 campaign, however.

What could Shero have done to prevent this problem? The bold move would have been to trade one of Malkin or Crosby — likely the former rather than latter. He could have practically dictated the price and built the offense around Crosby, while retaining enough cap flexibility to assemble a balanced group.

I've long thought about this. When you have 2 guys like Sid and Geno and their salaries the other lines almost have to suffer. I imagine that Chicago will eventually find that out if they go the route the Pens have.

Let's hope the drafting improves.

 

[Spike]

Now for the golden question

Who would you rather have on your team right now in Chicago, Toews and Kane, or Sid and Malkin?

 

[thesteelcity]

Now for the golden question

Who would you rather have on your team right now in Chicago, Toews and Kane, or Sid and Malkin?

the real question should be: Which team would you take, minus those four from the equation?

I can see why they are leaving the decision up to the new GM, because it's the way of the NHL of late. CAR, VAN and TOR went this route. He(new GM) may keep a coach or two or just clean house. If DD is the best option, as I don't see how, even with Trotz out there, then throwing him into the garbage while there is still meat on the bone could be a mistake, esp if a team snatches him up quickly, i.e. WASH.