Embarrassing End to Penguins' Season Must Conclude With Owners FSG Cleaning House

Thanks to their stunning loss to the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday night, as well as the New York Islanders' win over the Montreal Canadiens on Wednesday night, the Pittsburgh Penguins are officially eliminated from postseason contention.

It is the first time since the 2005-06 season that they have failed to qualify for the playoffs, and it is a stunning end to one of the biggest regular-season failures in franchise history.

It presents the team's ownership, Fenway Sports Group, with its first big, franchise-altering decision since it purchased the team nearly two years ago.

That decision should be easy after missing the playoffs.

It has to clean house in its front office and fire general manager Ron Hextall and president of hockey operations Brian Burke.

There is no way that duo can return for another season and potentially waste one of the few remaining years the Penguins have with their core of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang.

It is not only needed for the direction of the team on the ice, but it is also needed to show fans that FSG is paying attention to the team and is serious about putting out a competitive product.

To this point, FSG has been mostly invisible in Pittsburgh. It is seen as a nameless, faceless corporation that simply sees the Penguins as a money-printing business. There is no connection like there was with the previous majority ownership group of Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle. Penguins fans always knew where ownership stood with the team, what the objective was, and that they were going to spend every dime possible to put a winner on the ice.

Now? It is all a mystery, other than to look at what is happening with the other FSG-owned teams. They have had success with Liverpool FC and the Boston Red Sox, but that success has slipped in both cases in recent years, while it was eye-opening to see the latter trade an established, home-grown superstar in Mookie Betts in the prime of his career a few years ago. Is the investment always going to be there?

It is a great unknown at this point.

In the short term, though, FSG could win over a significant number of Penguins fans by swiftly taking action to clean out the front office that produced this failed season.

"Failure" is the only word for it.

As long as Crosby, Malkin and Letang are in a Penguins uniform, there has been an assumption that the team is going to not only try to win a Stanley Cup, but that it should at least be a contender for it. Certainly a playoff team.

What stands out about this season is that despite the fact all three players are in their mid-30s and closer to the end of their careers than their primes, they are still elite players. They are still good enough to be the foundation of a contending team.

Crosby has 91 points in 81 games entering play on Monday, while his 66 even-strength points are good enough for the top 10 in the NHL.

Malkin is still a point-per-game player and a star.

Even more than the production, this was the first season in their 16 years together that Crosby and Malkin will both play a full 82-game season without injury. They are also signed for an absolute bargain of a salary-cap hit of just $14.8 million per season.

To have two future Hall of Famers, two top-tier players, produce at that level, be healthy for the entire year and be signed for far below market value and still not be able to build a playoff team around them is a staggering failure on the part of Hextall, Burke and their entire hockey operations department.

The hard part was done for them. The superstars and the core players were already there.

All they had to do was not screw up the complementary pieces—which they did beyond all comprehension.

Pretty much every trade and move that Hextall made this season (and over the past two seasons) backfired spectacularly. The one lone exception to that was the trade and contract extension involving Rickard Rakell. But, other than that, they just made the team older, slower and more expensive, and they saddled the Penguins with bad contracts for future years while displaying no sort of coherent plan. Everything just seemed haphazardly thrown together. Between the ill-advised contract extension for 38-year-old Jeff Carter, as well as the trades for 35-year-old Jeff Petry and 31-year-old Mikael Granlund, the Penguins have over $14 million in salary-cap space going to those three next season. Carter and Granlund are liabilities, while Petry was not anything close to what the Penguins hoped he would be, and he is not likely to get any better.

Even worse, Petry and Granlund are still signed for another two full seasons.

It is just reckless salary-cap management.

The Granlund trade is the one that really solidified the fact that this front office just had no idea what it was doing or how to build a serious roster.

They managed to clear some serious salary-cap space at the trade deadline by waiving Kasperi Kapanen (and having him get claimed on waivers) and trading Brock McGinn and Teddy Blueger. That gave them the opportunity to maybe add a third-line center, defensive help or goaltending help.

Instead, they addressed none of those areas of need and traded a second-round pick for a player in Granlund who solved zero of their problems while simply adding another big contract for future years. It was a trade that widely panned the moment it was completed, and it turned out to be even worse than even the harshest critics could have imagined. Granlund scored just one goal in 20 games, and it came in the final minute of a 5-1 blowout win against the Philadelphia Flyers. It was the definition of a meaningless garbage-time goal. Beyond that, Hextall's big trade-deadline acquisition was a complete non-factor.

The Penguins' stars were still great this season. When one of Crosby or Malkin (or both) was on the ice, the Penguins outscored their opponents 119-101 during 5-on-5 play and had commanding shares of shot attempts, scoring chances and expected goals (well over 54 percent in all three categories), per Natural Stat Trick. The only player on their lines who was acquired by Hextall was Rakell. The rest of their top-two lines were holdovers from the previous front offices.

When neither player was on the ice? The Penguins were outscored 49-70 and were under 49 percent in pretty much every possession and scoring-chance metric.

Pretty much every player in the bottom-six was a Hextall/Burke addition.

They failed to build around two below-market cost superstars by surrounding them with sub-par depth forwards who did not fit.

They did not address the goaltending duo of Tristan Jarry and Casey DeSmith that has failed them in the playoffs the previous two seasons and failed them consistently this season.

They made the defense worse by trading out Mike Matheson and John Marino to bring in Petry, Ty Smith (who only played nine games in the NHL and spent the rest of the year in the American Hockey League) and Jan Rutta.

It was just a total front-office failure across the board.

If FSG wants to show Penguins fans they are serious about winning, this is their chance. Crosby, Malkin and Letang are still good enough and still cheap enough to do that. But Hextall and Burke have shown they are not the people to build around them.

If they are brought back for another season, it should set off alarm bells for Penguins fans about how invested their new ownership group is and how much they are actually paying attention to the team. They need to send a message.