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: The dual hiring of Ron Hextall and Brian Burke should send a strong signal to a sorry-looking team.
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THE TRANSCRIPT
Oh, come on, just admit it. The whole time you were listening to or reading the remarks of Ron Hextall and/or Brian Burke yesterday, all you were thinking of was whether or not they'll trade Kris Letang.
Come on, say it! Just say it!
Boy, did the Penguins make the headlines yesterday with the dual hiring of Hextall as general manager and Burke as president of hockey operations, a position that hadn't even existed. And all through everything that both men had to say ... I'm going to acknowledge it myself right here, I'm looking for the same clues you are: Are they going to blow up the core? And if they are, will they start by sending out Letang?
Sure enough, there were multiple references by both men to the core. And on every reference -- this is kind of important, I think -- they would say Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Letang. It was always Crosby, Malkin and Letang. There were obviously a couple of special mentions of Sid, but it was a three-man core. And you know what? That's actually what it is, when you're talking about the Penguins' core. If Marc-Andre Fleury were still here, t would be a four-man core. But he's not. So it's three.
And that core's going to define -- whether they see it that way or not -- how these two men are perceived in the short-term future. What both Hextall and Burke made very, very clear is that this season matters a lot, and there were several references to 'We'll see what these guys have' and 'We'll see what these players have.' They didn't specify the core, but that reminds me of a lot of different situations that I've covered in sports where someone will come in, and they don't make massive moves right away. They want to see what it is that they've got. They want to lay their own eyes on it. They want to see if they can make their own impact on improving it. Which any good executive will believe that they can do.
I look at this core right now pretty much the same way that I look at this whole team: It's blah. There's nothing going on. There's not one area of this team where you go, 'Well, at least they're doing that well,' because they're not. On those rare occasions when they do something well. It's isolated, like the other night against the Islanders, where I thought most of the forwards played pretty well. But if they came out tomorrow night against the Islanders and stunk it up in that same capacity, I wouldn't be surprised any more than you would. The defense is easy to let off the hook because they're missing so many guys, but not the goaltending. Not the power play. Not the early penalty-killing. Not the fire. Not the focus. Nothing. Nothing.
I'm not there to blame this head coach for that. I'm not there yet. I'm sorry. I've seen way too much good from Mike Sullivan. But I am very much in line with the idea that the organization has this general lack of hunger feel to it. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's personnel. I'm more inclined to believe that it's personnel than anything else. Because when I look at Brandon Tanev out there, I don't think, 'Boy, now here's somebody who really lacks fire and energy.' No, why? Because he's just born that way. Should there be more of his types on the roster? I don't know. Should there be more youth and freshness? More speed?
These are the kinds of decisions that I think right off the bat Hextall and/or Burke are going to have to make to transform the Penguins into a contender. Because they aren't that now.
This is what Hextall had to say when asked yesterday about his general view of the state of the Penguins: "It's a hard question to answer with what you're gonna do in the future here, but what we're looking to do is make the Pittsburgh Penguins the best team we can this year. We'll see where it goes. We'll show how good we are with how our players respond. And we'll address things as we go along. In terms of the future, you've obviously always got to look at the future, but you have to look at the present. The focus right now is on making the Pittsburgh Penguins the best we can right now till the end of the year."
Now where Burke is concerned, of course, no one had to ask because he made his views on the current state of the Penguins, very public and very visible just three months ago, in a segment on Canada's Sportsnet, in which he basically decried them as not being competitive with the Lightning and Capitals with their cap issues, and where their roster is.
He was asked about that statement yesterday: "I'm not going to back away from anything I said in my immediate role. And I'm talking about the way I compare teams is, you take a team, you write it down on paper, and put it next to the Tampa Bay Lightning, or put it next to the Washington Capitals. And that's my job as an analyst on TV is to say, 'OK, I have to pick which of these teams will finish out of the other ones.' And all the teams that have had success have cap issues. There's a whole bunch of teams with extreme salary cap issues who haven't won a bloody thing. At least in Pittsburgh, when Jimmy Rutherford goes to buy gas, he's got two rings on. So to me, I'm not gonna back away from anything I said. But I also think when you have pieces like we have here, you've got to try to win."
Pick up on any clues there?
Nope, neither. Not from Burke, not from Hextall. And I strongly suspect there's a good reason for that in the short term, just as I strongly suspect, that there's a good reason that these two men were the choices at this time.
See, here's the thing, even though there was never a president of hockey operations until yesterday, there always was one hockey guy ranking over the GM, and he's only the greatest hockey guy who ever lived. And when you're listening to the 17-minute call that David Morehouse, Hextall and Burke had with us reporter types yesterday, and you hear Mario Lemieux's name come up once, twice, three times ... you don't have to wonder where this came from. I also don't think you have to wonder at least not very hard. Why Jim Rutherford wasn't given an extension.
As I've been reporting from the outset of the Rutherford resignation. Jim was upset that he didn't get an extension he didn't want to be put into a lame duck position, where if things didn't go well, he'd get fired. He's 71 years old. He's achieved an awful lot. He's in the Hall of Fame. The last thing he needed to do or wanted to do was to get fired on his way out of his last job. So he left.
Somebody over his head made the decision that he wasn't going to be the guy unless this thing got straightened out. And that's Mario.
And when you hear these guys say Mario was in favor of adding Burke -- 'Why not Burkie?' -- that's an even stronger sign of his dissatisfaction with the state of the organization. That's a dissatisfaction that probably only comes with one exception in Sid. Everything else about this organization -- coaches, players, development, whatever -- should be open to scrutiny and or change. That's the way I read this. That's the way I receive all of this.
So it's not just about trading Letang. Some people have hilariously tried to turn the Rutherford resignation itself into something about Letang. No. The team, the franchise, lacks that hunger, that fire that you need to win a championship. And they know what that hunger what that fire looks like, feels like because they've experienced it five times. No one knows it better than the guy at the very top.
This isn't done to send a message or a warning. You don't you don't sign people like Hextall and Burke for any sort of short-term impact. That would be a terrible way to run your sporting business. But it's going to have that impact. And it's going to have that impact right away. Unless it doesn't, and to those people who don't get the message right now, or at least in the very, very near future, they won't be here. Not just Letang or even Malkin. It could be anybody on the roster. It could be any coach. It could be any development person. Everybody's on the hot seat right now.