Mike Colligan of The Hockey Writers joins the podcast for an in-depth discussion of the Pens' offseason. We touch on everything -- the Boston series, Rob Scuderi, Matt D'Agostini, Dan Bylsma, Letang/Kunitz/Dupuis/Adams signings, Fleury, and what moves are still left to make. Plus so much else. We even debate whether Rob Scuderi got burned by Ovechkin four years ago. It's a can't miss GTOG Podcast.
You can listen below or on our Spreaker page. If you want to take the podcast mobile, either click here to subscribe on iTunes, or download the Spreaker app for iPhone or Android.
Showing posts with label Dan Bylsma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan Bylsma. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Pens season recap podcast: What's next? Discussing Bylsma, Malkin, Fleury and more
Now that Ray Shero has spoken and the Pens have signed Dan Bylsma to a 2-year contract extension, the change that's coming to this team is in personnel only. On GTOG's official season wrap-up podcast, we talk about Shero's press conference, his support of Bylsma and Fleury, what the Pens should and will do this summer with Malkin and Letang, and all the other choices -- some easy, some hard -- that the team will have to make this offseason. It's the GTOG Podcast.
Listen while you watch the Stanley Cup Finals with Pierre McGuire muted.
You can listen below or on our Spreaker page. If you want to take the podcast mobile, either click here to subscribe on iTunes, or download the Spreaker app for iPhone or Android.
Listen while you watch the Stanley Cup Finals with Pierre McGuire muted.
You can listen below or on our Spreaker page. If you want to take the podcast mobile, either click here to subscribe on iTunes, or download the Spreaker app for iPhone or Android.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Dan Bylsma's awkward embrace of Fleury: What's going on here?
By Finesse (follow me on Twitter)
[Click here for our podcast and post recapping the end of the Pens' season]
The landscape around the Pens is a real mess right now.
Dan Bylsma held a press conference yesterday and talked confidently about Marc-Andre Fleury in an exchange that was either sanctioned by the Pens' top brass or was an outright act of insubordination.
Said Bylsma, per the Post-Gazette:
Dejan Kovacevic rightly noted the absurdity of Bylsma's position, both on the substance of what he said and on the mere fact that he said it given that Bylsma is, you know, not the general manager.
But Ron Cook, being Ron Cook, decided to come out in full-throated support of Bylsma, suggesting that the Pens give him an extension this summer because it wasn't Bylsma's fault the Pens lost and hockey coaches too often get a raw deal.
It's a lot to digest on this Monday morning, so let us make just two quick points:
1) Even putting aside the highly questionable merits of Bylsma guaranteeing Fleury the top goalie spot next season (something we will discuss at length in a podcast later this week), we don't want Fleury to come back next season for selfish reasons. We'll spend 82 games waiting for the implosion. When Flower gets some 18-save shutout against Tampa over Thanksgiving weekend next season, are we supposed to think that means everything will be OK come late April? He feels like a ticking time-bomb. A $5 million suicide vest.
2) We're still sorting through our own thoughts on whether the Pens should retain Bylsma, but we're not operating on the faulty assumption that the following two statements are mutually exclusive: Dan Bylsma is a good coach, and the Pens need to fire him. Both can be true. There is no shortage of candidates for blame for the Pens' four straight playoff disappointments, but debating the relative blameworthiness of the coach, players, and management doesn't address the only question that matters: How do the Pens ensure that the next four playoffs don't end the same way?
As we wrote about last week, NHL coaches have a shelf-life and Dan Bylsma will start next season already at double the average tenure of Stanley Cup winning coaches since 1990. Maybe he's outlived his utility in Pittsburgh. Or maybe not. But either way, yesterday certainly didn't help.
[Click here for our podcast and post recapping the end of the Pens' season]
The landscape around the Pens is a real mess right now.
 |
| It's about to get real weird. |
Said Bylsma, per the Post-Gazette:
"Marc-Andre Fleury is our No. 1 goalie."And regarding Tomas Vokoun:
"He's the No. 1 goalie for this franchise, and he will be going forward."
"Marc-Andre Fleury is a guy who's going to come back to our team [next season] and he's going to be the No. 1 goalie. He's going to be our franchise goalie, this franchise's goalie. Marc-Andre Fleury is going to go back in net. He's going to take the net. He's going to be the No. 1 goalie. He's going to play great. There's no question about that. And he's going to win a lot of hockey games for this team next season. He'll have that opportunity in the playoffs again when this team gets there."
"Tomas, I don't think, is in any different boat than he was when he came in here for last season. He's a guy who makes our goaltending tandem a very good one. He's going to play games for us, big games for us. He came in and did for us exactly what we signed him for last year. Next year, he's not going to get that opportunity [to become the starter] because Marc-Andre Fleury's going to be in net winning hockey games."What the hell? Read on for our quick thoughts...
Dejan Kovacevic rightly noted the absurdity of Bylsma's position, both on the substance of what he said and on the mere fact that he said it given that Bylsma is, you know, not the general manager.
But Ron Cook, being Ron Cook, decided to come out in full-throated support of Bylsma, suggesting that the Pens give him an extension this summer because it wasn't Bylsma's fault the Pens lost and hockey coaches too often get a raw deal.
It's a lot to digest on this Monday morning, so let us make just two quick points:
1) Even putting aside the highly questionable merits of Bylsma guaranteeing Fleury the top goalie spot next season (something we will discuss at length in a podcast later this week), we don't want Fleury to come back next season for selfish reasons. We'll spend 82 games waiting for the implosion. When Flower gets some 18-save shutout against Tampa over Thanksgiving weekend next season, are we supposed to think that means everything will be OK come late April? He feels like a ticking time-bomb. A $5 million suicide vest.
2) We're still sorting through our own thoughts on whether the Pens should retain Bylsma, but we're not operating on the faulty assumption that the following two statements are mutually exclusive: Dan Bylsma is a good coach, and the Pens need to fire him. Both can be true. There is no shortage of candidates for blame for the Pens' four straight playoff disappointments, but debating the relative blameworthiness of the coach, players, and management doesn't address the only question that matters: How do the Pens ensure that the next four playoffs don't end the same way?
As we wrote about last week, NHL coaches have a shelf-life and Dan Bylsma will start next season already at double the average tenure of Stanley Cup winning coaches since 1990. Maybe he's outlived his utility in Pittsburgh. Or maybe not. But either way, yesterday certainly didn't help.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Pens fall to Bruins, 1-0; Season ends with a whimper
By Finesse (follow me on Twitter)
[Listen to the Game 4 recap podcast below or on our Spreaker page. You can click here to subscribe on iTunes, or download the Spreaker app for iPhone or Android]
If pucks could talk, Jarome Iginla's wrist shot at the final buzzer would have let out a feeble whimper as it landed almost apologetically in the glove of Tukka Rask. It was a fitting and symbolic end to a series the Pens deserved to lose and the Bruins deserved to win. Now armed with a body of work that reads like an inventory of a losing team's most-favored excuses -- a hot goalie, injuries, a bad goalie, and no good bounces -- the Pens have another long offseason of soul-searching ahead.
Read on for the burial...
When a team loses in such a spectacularly disappointing manner, the brain can pull you in two opposite directions are the same time. There's the reactionary "fire everybody, Crosby sucks" approach, and then there's the "I'll just wait a few weeks and let this pain fade away so that when I decide what changes I want to make I will have tricked myself into thinking we were just a few bounces away" method (aka, The Full Leonsis).
The truth for Ray Shero and the Pens is somewhere in between, but he'd be wise to not waste the opportunity that comes with having your team so thoroughly embarrassed for the world to see. Though the systematic errors are glaring and the individual failures are spectacular, the common thread that binds the last four playoff disappointments was woven at the Herm Edwards School of Simplicity: the Pens don't do the right thing often enough.
It's less important what that right thing is, and much more important that the Pens either can't identify it or can't do it. The Pens started the Eastern Conference Finals playing the right way, but couldn't sustain it when it turned out that Boston was not going to be like Ottawa and pour the accelerating lubricant for the Pens' glide into the next round. So the Pens stopped playing the right way for the next 5 periods and instead dug the first three feet of their own grave. And once the Pens identified the problems in the way they played in games 1 and 2 and tightened up defensively, they could not, shot-differential be damned, consistently generate anything resembling the high quality scoring chances that the Pens would need to beat a locked-in goalie like Rask. The Pens may spend the next few weeks feeling sorry for themselves for not catching a single break over 8 periods in Boston, but that would obscure the fact that the Pens rolled over when things didn't come easily in games 1 and 2, and couldn't persevere in games 3 and 4 once they finally seemed to grasp the idea that winning playoff games is supposed to be hard.
The Pens would have eventually broken through on Rask had they continued to play the way they did in games 3 and 4, but you don't get an "eventually" in the playoffs. And, given this team's track record of mixing random slices of inexcusable chaos into their discipline sandwich, what indication is there that the Pens could have sustained their overall solid performances in games 3 and 4 anyway?
It doesn't matter what might have happened in a game 5 or if the Pens had taken the lead at any point in one of these games because they didn't. It doesn't matter if the Pens were playing the right way when they went out because they went out. By design, the playoffs require excellence across a small sample size; whether the Pens were trending in the right direction when they went out is irrelevant. There's already a trophy for trending well over a large amount of time.
It's an indictment of everyone in the organization that the Pens went out this way, so it's hard to pin more blame on any one person than it is on another. Ray Shero's acquisitions didn't get the team any further than it would have gone without those guys, and it's easy to argue that getting both Morrow and Iginla stagnated a team that simply didn't need both of them. It's great to have a fancy shoe collection, but you can only wear one pair at a time. Dan Bylsma added to an ever-growing resume of presiding over inexplicable performances, and when he finally recalibrated his team in one area (defense), he seemed to do it at the expense of another (offense). Crosby, Malkin, Neal and Letang had no points in 4 games, and while that will almost certainly never happen again over any future 4-game stretch, it still happened. And the supporting cast, supposedly the deepest in the league, didn't hold the fort while the stars got it together. It was a total failure by everyone.
Last night's game was exciting only because it was meaningful -- if that game happens in December, it's a total snooze fest, the kind of game where if you DVR'd it, you'd actually get mad at your roommate for NOT spoiling the score and warning you against spending three hours watching it. It's admirable (and appreciated because we watch all 82 games of it) that the Pens try to play hockey the way most people want it to be played; you know, with actual goals and excitement. But the Pens have to be careful not to martyr themselves as the paragon of the way hockey should be played. Because while it might be nice to enjoy the spoils of the afterlife -- like the MVP and Norris Trophy that could be coming in a couple days -- the bottom line is that you're dead.
[Listen to the Game 4 recap podcast below or on our Spreaker page. You can click here to subscribe on iTunes, or download the Spreaker app for iPhone or Android]
If pucks could talk, Jarome Iginla's wrist shot at the final buzzer would have let out a feeble whimper as it landed almost apologetically in the glove of Tukka Rask. It was a fitting and symbolic end to a series the Pens deserved to lose and the Bruins deserved to win. Now armed with a body of work that reads like an inventory of a losing team's most-favored excuses -- a hot goalie, injuries, a bad goalie, and no good bounces -- the Pens have another long offseason of soul-searching ahead.
Read on for the burial...
When a team loses in such a spectacularly disappointing manner, the brain can pull you in two opposite directions are the same time. There's the reactionary "fire everybody, Crosby sucks" approach, and then there's the "I'll just wait a few weeks and let this pain fade away so that when I decide what changes I want to make I will have tricked myself into thinking we were just a few bounces away" method (aka, The Full Leonsis).
The truth for Ray Shero and the Pens is somewhere in between, but he'd be wise to not waste the opportunity that comes with having your team so thoroughly embarrassed for the world to see. Though the systematic errors are glaring and the individual failures are spectacular, the common thread that binds the last four playoff disappointments was woven at the Herm Edwards School of Simplicity: the Pens don't do the right thing often enough.
It's less important what that right thing is, and much more important that the Pens either can't identify it or can't do it. The Pens started the Eastern Conference Finals playing the right way, but couldn't sustain it when it turned out that Boston was not going to be like Ottawa and pour the accelerating lubricant for the Pens' glide into the next round. So the Pens stopped playing the right way for the next 5 periods and instead dug the first three feet of their own grave. And once the Pens identified the problems in the way they played in games 1 and 2 and tightened up defensively, they could not, shot-differential be damned, consistently generate anything resembling the high quality scoring chances that the Pens would need to beat a locked-in goalie like Rask. The Pens may spend the next few weeks feeling sorry for themselves for not catching a single break over 8 periods in Boston, but that would obscure the fact that the Pens rolled over when things didn't come easily in games 1 and 2, and couldn't persevere in games 3 and 4 once they finally seemed to grasp the idea that winning playoff games is supposed to be hard.
The Pens would have eventually broken through on Rask had they continued to play the way they did in games 3 and 4, but you don't get an "eventually" in the playoffs. And, given this team's track record of mixing random slices of inexcusable chaos into their discipline sandwich, what indication is there that the Pens could have sustained their overall solid performances in games 3 and 4 anyway?
It doesn't matter what might have happened in a game 5 or if the Pens had taken the lead at any point in one of these games because they didn't. It doesn't matter if the Pens were playing the right way when they went out because they went out. By design, the playoffs require excellence across a small sample size; whether the Pens were trending in the right direction when they went out is irrelevant. There's already a trophy for trending well over a large amount of time.
 |
| Comfort food for GTOG. |
Last night's game was exciting only because it was meaningful -- if that game happens in December, it's a total snooze fest, the kind of game where if you DVR'd it, you'd actually get mad at your roommate for NOT spoiling the score and warning you against spending three hours watching it. It's admirable (and appreciated because we watch all 82 games of it) that the Pens try to play hockey the way most people want it to be played; you know, with actual goals and excitement. But the Pens have to be careful not to martyr themselves as the paragon of the way hockey should be played. Because while it might be nice to enjoy the spoils of the afterlife -- like the MVP and Norris Trophy that could be coming in a couple days -- the bottom line is that you're dead.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Raw Emotion Podcast: The End. Pens lose, 1-0
Pens could have played all weekend. Still wouldn't have scored.
We talk about Game 4, Bylsma's future, the Bruins' defense, late-payment forgiveness, and so much more. It's the GTOG Podcast.
Listen below or click here. And as always, click here to subscribe on iTunes.
**If you're listening on your smartphone, the best ways to make sure that you have an uninterrupted experience are: 1) download the podcast from iTunes OR 2) download the Spreaker app by going to the App store and searching for "Spreaker" then "Get To Our Game"**
We talk about Game 4, Bylsma's future, the Bruins' defense, late-payment forgiveness, and so much more. It's the GTOG Podcast.
Listen below or click here. And as always, click here to subscribe on iTunes.
**If you're listening on your smartphone, the best ways to make sure that you have an uninterrupted experience are: 1) download the podcast from iTunes OR 2) download the Spreaker app by going to the App store and searching for "Spreaker" then "Get To Our Game"**
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Can the Penguins win another Stanley Cup with Dan Bylsma?
By Finesse (follow me on Twitter)
Every chart we've made this season has been an enormous jinx. Given the desperation of the Pens' current situation, let's try a reverse jinx.
Dan Bylsma won the Stanley Cup with the Penguins having coached less than half a season. That seems crazy, but it's possible that he had a better chance of winning the Cup in 2009 than he has (had?) of winning the Cup this season. Or next.
The surprising numbers, after the jump...
The following chart lists the Stanley Cup winning coaches since 1990 and shows how long they were in that job when they won the Cup that season.
The average tenure of a Stanley Cup winning coach since 1990 is 2.36 years. If you take Scotty Bowman out of the equation, the average Stanley Cup winning coach since 1990 has been in that position for only 1.83 years when he won the Cup. Dan Bylsma has been the Pens' coach for 4.5 years.
Someone will repeat this year, but the fact remains that NHL coaches win early, not often.
So the question isn't whether the Pens can win a Stanley Cup with Dan Bylsma. They already have. The question is whether they can win another one.
Every chart we've made this season has been an enormous jinx. Given the desperation of the Pens' current situation, let's try a reverse jinx.
Dan Bylsma won the Stanley Cup with the Penguins having coached less than half a season. That seems crazy, but it's possible that he had a better chance of winning the Cup in 2009 than he has (had?) of winning the Cup this season. Or next.
The surprising numbers, after the jump...
The following chart lists the Stanley Cup winning coaches since 1990 and shows how long they were in that job when they won the Cup that season.
The average tenure of a Stanley Cup winning coach since 1990 is 2.36 years. If you take Scotty Bowman out of the equation, the average Stanley Cup winning coach since 1990 has been in that position for only 1.83 years when he won the Cup. Dan Bylsma has been the Pens' coach for 4.5 years.
Someone will repeat this year, but the fact remains that NHL coaches win early, not often.
So the question isn't whether the Pens can win a Stanley Cup with Dan Bylsma. They already have. The question is whether they can win another one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)