Welcome to DK Sports Radio and a new Daily Shot of Penguins, my every-weekday, half-hour program on the local hockey franchise. Today's episode: With all these defensemen down, it's an ideal time for Mike Sullivan to push hard to instill his system.
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THE TRANSCRIPT
Even when the Penguins' defenseman are getting healthy, they're getting hurt. Mike Matheson ran into a teammate yesterday at practice in Cranberry, and needed help going off the ice, visibly shaken up. In a practice.
And that is the state of your Pittsburgh blue line right now.
With this big break that Mike Sullivan, his staff and the players have been handed by half of the Devils coming down with COVID, you would think it would represent an opportunity for everybody to get all good again. But that's not how it's going. That's not at all how it's going for this team on the back end. And I'm here to tell you today why that actually could be a good thing moving forward.
Before I get to my thoughts on the state of the defense, a little bit of an update: Marcus Pettersson at least skated with the taxi squad yesterday morning. That was good news. No signs at all of Brian Dumoulin and Juuso Riikola, neither of whom have resumed skating yet. And now of course Matheson's status is right back up in the air. The only defenseman who's stayed healthy through all of this has been John Marino, and it doesn't even seem to amuse him.
"It's kind of crazy to think about the injuries we've had, the bad luck we've had. Here's hoping we getting rid of this."
That was Marino yesterday after practice, and he didn't even get a bit of a giggle out of being asked what it's like to be the last defenseman standing.
But this can be positive. And there's precedent for it being positive under this head coach. When Sullivan can sell his players on the merits of defending first and foremost of making that their top priority, he gets his best results. There is no question about that. If you go back to when he took over in the middle of the 2015-16 season, and they still looked a little slow upon his arrival ... it wasn't until he got them understanding that, 'Look, you changed coaches, but the results didn't really change, so are you going to listen to me or not?' And they realized that this really, really talented team was about to blow its season if they didn't start defending and they didn't do a lot of other good things that ended up contributing to the 2016 Stanley Cup.
It can't be a coincidence that, on the morning of Game 6 in San Jose, Sullivan had exactly two words to share with Kris Letang: 'Just defend.' That's what Letang told me that himself that night on the ice out there at SAP Center. 'Just defend,' because all good things for Letang come when he's defensively sound first, and then kind of does all his other stuff as gravy, not the other way around.
There's only one Letang on this core, for better or worse, but the principle applies across the board as it relates to this system. Do you remember early in the 2019-20 season how bad the Penguins were, in particular defensively, and then had a ton of injuries? Most of those were guys up front, were stars. But Sullivan seized that opportunity. They brought up a bunch of Brian Gibbons types from the minors, plugged some holes. Andhe got everybody to listen to what it was that he wanted them to do. And that's rare air for this group. It just is. That's just how it is. It's how it's been in Pittsburgh for a very, very long time. And using the phrase again, for better or worse.
But man, did the team take off. Instantly. That road trip through St. Paul and Winnipeg, do you remember that? They mauled the Wild and the Jets despite missing a ton of guys. Outworked them. Embarrassed them. And they defended, first and foremost, since they were missing all those guys and had no choice.
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm not so sure Matheson's a player that you want in your lineup right now, anyway, but it's still another guy who's missing and another left-handed guy who's missing. So you're gonna have more players shifting over to the wrong side. There's a challenge there. But the challenge shouldn't just be to the replacement defensemen. The challenge should be issued to both goaltenders, who need to be a lot better than they've been. And maybe this in a weird way will help it'll sharpen them up. But way more than any of that, to the forwards. Let's see them get invested and stay invested in playing 200-foot hockey. I liked what I saw from the forwards the other night on Long Island. I thought that might have been the best game that collective group has had all season. And that's that's wonderful. That's ideal. But it needs to stick, the way it did through that St. Paul/Winnipeg trip that really ended up defining their season. That needs to happen.
Look, this season needs some kind of pivotal, breakthrough moment, doesn't it?
Don't you get that sense?
And you can shrug it off because it's 11 games in, but it's a 56-game schedule. This team is still missing that moment that, 'Wow, hey, actually look at us. We are pretty good. We could be doing this every night.' Instead we kind of see it in fragments and in pieces. It all needs to come together. And if there's one thing that's going to bring it together, it's going to be defending out of necessity.