The last time the Pittsburgh Penguins announced a new general manager they shocked the hockey world by hiring Jim Rutherford, the long-tenured Carolina Hurricanes executive who introduced himself by saying he expected to be in Pittsburgh for only about three seasons.
Three seasons later, Rutherford was raising his second Stanley Cup with the Penguins.
After he stepped down in January for unspecified personal reasons, Pittsburgh certainly felt the pressure of an encore. The Penguins are at a crossroads as a contender, as they were when Rutherford was hired.
On Tuesday, they shocked the hockey world again.
Ron Hextall hired as general manager? Not too shocking, if we're being honest. He's been on the radar for a few openings since the Philadelphia Flyers fired him in 2018. Perhaps the only surprise is that such a hated rival of the Penguins as a player is now running their team -- although Hextall said he grew up a Penguins fan and, well, one assumes he'd like to get a measure of revenge against the franchise that fired him, too.
But Brian Burke? That was the shock. The way it came together: Co-owner Mario Lemieux suggested that David Morehouse, the team's president and CEO, reach out to Burke as a sounding board during the team's hiring process. Specifically, Morehouse asked him about Hextall after the first round of interviews.
"He not only gave me sage advice on Ron Hextall, he gave me sage advice going through this process," said Morehouse.
The Penguins had considered adding a president of hockey operations along with a general manager during their search and decided to revisit the concept with Burke. He wasn't searching for a new opportunity in the NHL. But working for Lemieux and the Penguins proved to be too alluring him for him to turn down. For the Penguins, they get the same kind of executive that they hired in Rutherford: someone with a penchant for bold moves, who also happens to have a Stanley Cup on his finger.
Oh, and now Burke finally gets Sidney Crosby on his team, too.
"If you remember back in the lottery in [2005], I just missed on Sidney Crosby," said Burke, whose Anaheim Ducks team earned the second overall pick and drafted Bobby Ryan. "Well, now I got Sidney Crosby."
That he does ... as well as some huge challenges. Here is what Burke and Hextall face as they take over the Penguins.
Challenge No. 1: Ownership is thinking 'win now'
In my conversations with some of the candidates for the Penguins' general manager opening, it's clear Pittsburgh entered this process with an open mind about the future but with a stated desire to win another Stanley Cup in short order.
"We're not in a rebuilding mode. We're in a win-now mode. And we're going to continue to be in that mode until we're in a rebuilding mode. For right now, we're looking for someone to come in and continue having us work toward winning another Cup," said David Morehouse, the team's president and CEO, when Rutherford stepped down.
The Penguins are a .500 team to start the season at 5-5-1, going a putrid 1-4-1 on the road. They're 19th in goals per game at 2.82, and 29th in goals against per game at 3.73, with an NHL-worst .861 team save percentage on the season; yes, worse even than the Ottawa Senators, owners of a .192 points percentage.
Yet if you ask NHL executives, many are higher on the Penguins than the numbers would indicate. "It's a good team, when you look at it. They have a good defense. They have a good group of forwards. Their goaltending hasn't been great, and needs to be better, but [Tristan] Jarry is capable," one NHL general manager said.
So the first challenge is a philosophical one: Should the Penguins be in "win-now" mode? Because if this were a poker game, Pittsburgh is face down on the felt table, looking at a diminishing stack of chips, wondering if they should still raise.
"It's a hard question to answer with what we're going to do in the future here, but what we're looking to do is to make the Pittsburgh Penguins the best team it can be this year," Hextall said. "We'll see where we are. We'll see how our players respond, and we'll address things as we go along. In terms of the future ... you always have to look at the future. But the focus is on the present right now and making the Pittsburgh Penguins the best we can until the end of the year."
In other words, it's going to be hard for the new regime to steer this ship in a different direction until they have a sense of where the wind is blowing. And right now, the gusts from ownership and management have them pointed at "win now."
"They're going to take us in the direction we're used to going in. Nothing's changed. We're the Pittsburgh Penguins, and we're here to win," Morehouse said.
Challenge No. 2: Hiring a guy who thinks the window is closed
Making the leap from the unwashed masses of the sports media back into executive management is a tricky jump. Usually, out-of-work front-office gurus go radio silent in between gigs rather than become part of the punditry, afraid of saying anything that could come back to haunt them.
Not so with Burke, who parted ways with the Calgary Flames in 2018 and then signed up with Sportsnet to quickly become their new rock star bloviator, especially in the vacuum created by the departure of Don Cherry. He has never been one to hold back, and he certainly hasn't held back about the Penguins in the past few months.
Burke was on the "Spittin' Chiclets" podcast in November 2020 and brought up Pittsburgh while speaking about the Chicago Blackhawks, and their decision on whether to aggressively surround their aging core to contend now, or to slink back into a rebuild.
"It is the same thing Jimmy Rutherford is saying in Pittsburgh, 'I've got two elite players, we're not going to a total rebuild, were gonna try and win.' I don't think Pittsburgh is good enough to win," he said. "No matter what they do now with their cap situation, I think that window has closed, for me. I love Jimmy Rutherford, you know that, but I look in the East and I say are they better than Tampa? Nope. Are they better than Washington? Nope. Are they better than Boston? Nope. And this is the same thing."
"Fact is, those teams aren't close to championship-caliber in my mind. So you're better off getting really good fast or getting bad fast. There is no mushy middle."
I asked Burke about his proclamation that the window had closed, three months before being tasked with turning the Penguins into champions.
"I'm not going to back away from anything I said in my media role. The way I compare teams is, you take a team and you write it down on paper and put it next to the Tampa Bay Lightning or put it next to the Washington Capitals. That's my job as an analyst on TV. I have to pick where one of these teams will finish ahead of the other ones," Burke said.
"All the teams that have had success have had cap issues. There's a whole bunch of teams with extreme salary cap issues that haven't won a bloody thing. At least in Pittsburgh, when Jimmy Rutherford goes to buy gas, he's got two rings on. I'm not going to back away from anything I said, but when you have pieces like we have here, you've gotta try to win."
Even when you're not good enough to win, apparently.
Challenge No. 3: The cupboard is bare
The Penguins' salary cap issues are significant. Cap Friendly indicates that they currently have $152,465 in open space. For 2021-22, under what will likely be an $81.5 million salary cap, the Penguins have only $2,196,492 open, with 17 players under contract. (It gets a lot easier in 2022-23, for reasons we'll address in a moment.)
As Burke said, the Penguins wouldn't be the first team to contend while contending with salary cap headaches -- heck, last season's Stanley Cup finalist Dallas Stars had $815 in open cap space by the end of the regular season. We did not forget a comma: That's eight hundred and fifteen dollars. Like, less than the price of a new TV.
But being a cap team does necessitate a "dollars in, dollars out" credo for trades, and the flat salary cap certainly impacts that as well. According to Cap Friendly, there are 19 teams in the NHL right now that have less than $1 million in cap space. Again, this doesn't make transactions impossible. It just demands that some mathematical gymnastics are performed.
The bigger challenge for Burke and Hextall is that the Penguins don't have much in terms of future assets to move. Pittsburgh ranked 31st in the ESPN prospect pipeline evaluation in December 2020, with its pool even shallower than it had been in 2019. The Penguins' first-round pick in 2021 belongs to the Minnesota Wild, having been sent there in the Jason Zucker deal last season. And first-rounders are coin of the realm for general managers looking to aggressively make impactful trades: Burke traded a first in packages to acquire Chris Pronger, Phil Kessel and Trevor Linden during his previous stints as an NHL front office maven.
The Penguins also don't have a third-, fourth- or sixth-round pick in this year's draft.
"Their pantry is absolutely empty," is how one NHL executive source put it.
Challenge No. 4: The Evgeni Malkin problem
Hextall was asked about the future of Crosby, Malkin and Kris Letang.
"I can't tell you what's coming our way. I can't. I can't tell you how good our team is going to be for the rest of the year. To be definitive in a direction ... obviously, we have different ideas. In my interviews, we talked about all kinds of different scenarios. We went through them all," he said. "You've got players in Crosby, Malkin and Letang ... we want to be as good as we can be right now with three of the best players in the world."
Crosby is signed through 2024-25 at his numerological $8.7 million cap hit. Malkin has is signed through 2021-22 at a $9.5 million hit. Letang is also signed through 2021-22 at a $7.25 million hit. Malkin and Crosby have no-movement clauses. Letang has a no-move as well as a no-trade clause that limits his potential field to 18 teams.
In approaching the future of their core, the Penguins need to be more creative than idealistic.
Idealistic is believing that all three members of the core -- Crosby, Malkin and Letang -- are going to finish out their careers with "PIT" all the way down the column of their career stats page. Could it happen with one of them? Absolutely, and that one is Crosby, unless he decides he wants to take his talents to play wherever Cole Harbour bestie Nathan MacKinnon resides. (But alas, this isn't the NBA, so the chances of that kind of universe-reordering move happening are slim to none.)
There shouldn't be the same loyalty to Letang and Malkin. But multiple sources have indicated that has been the line that Penguins ownership has held: not to trade either. This is especially true for Malkin, as the Penguins have been approached in recent years with tantalizing trade opportunities that would have both helped them in the short term and turned back the clock on their roster. But those deals didn't happen, and it wasn't for a lack of trying from Malkin's suitors.
There's no question that Malkin could deliver a heck of a return in a trade, because even with his defensive deficiencies he remains capable of a 1.35 points-per-game season like he had in 2019-20. But there's also no question that the Penguins would still be a better team with him.
Malkin is an icon. He has to play like an icon. He has another level that he hasn't been able to attain in the past few seasons, of the kind of total and consistent dominance that we've seen in the past. Does he want a change in scenery? Does he want to shake up his life?
A top priority for Burke and Hextall, with both players entering the last years of their deals after this season, is figuring out where Malkin and Letang fit best. And if it's not in Pittsburgh, getting ownership to buy in to that decision. This is easier said than done when Lemieux sees Malkin as a Pittsburgh lifer, both out of loyalty and out of fear of another Jaromir Jagr trade.
Challenge No. 5: Combining philosophies
Hextall and Burke are a bit of an odd couple, when you think about it.
Hextall famously distanced his Flyers teams from the "Broad Street Bullies" personas of the past. If you look at the Flyers' penalty minutes per game over the past 15 seasons, Hextall's run from 2014-18 and the three seasons that followed his firing incorporate the bottom seven spots. Burke, meanwhile, has a stated philosophy of building his teams with toughness and "pugnacity," and has followed through on that philosophy at every tour stop.
Hextall has been praised for his smart team building in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, but his tenure with the Flyers ended with criticism that he was too patient in his managerial style. Burke, meanwhile, has earned his reputation as one of the boldest wheelers and dealers in the NHL. The guy who landed both Sedins in Vancouver. The guy who made the Pronger trade in Anaheim, as well as the Kessel and Dion Phaneuf trades in Toronto.
Competing visions isn't a bad thing. It's entirely possible Hextall and Burke both bring their ideology to the table and make a great meal. Whatever happens, it's going to be fascinating to watch; and, in the case of Brian Burke, listen to.