Toggle sidebar

Speculation: Penguins off day talk thread: Yes, Sully is still the coach

Status
Not open for further replies.
Big Friggin Dummy said:
They needed two wingers for Geno's line, one of which needed to be a significant scoring threat. They needed to remove several bad fits/deadweight players. They needed to fire the coaching staff. They needed to find some more muscle/snarl for the middle-6. That's a lotta work.

This is a whole lotta bullshit that you and I both knew wasn't gonna happen all summer. :laugh: This forum kicks around ideas about 500x more ambitious than anything that's happened since probably the Brassard trade.

Smith-Zucker was a lateral move from the second it was announced; a 3rd liner without the scoring punch Geno's line has needed for years. This team adores that slop. EK landed in this team's lap for basically free and was predictably neutered almost immediately by Sullivan and Reirden's coaching. The bottom-6 was just as dogshit as it's been under Hextall. Team's still pissweak physically in all three zones. The blueline still has one defensively competent guy and is a mess otherwise.

Predictable and cowardly. Just like I've been saying for years. Era's dead, they'll keep pretending it isn't until Sid retires, but the Cup window slammed shut so hard it shattered the glass back when Mario shrugged in 2020. You can be mad if you want, but it's wasted energy. The reality is we get to either eat this shit sandwich until Sid retires or go find another hobby/habit until the rebuild starts, cuz it's just gonna be the exact thing we've seen the past few years, steadily worsening, until an ugly teardown and rebuilding phase that'll probably last a decade.
Click to expand...

Certain GMs would do it. Thought Dubas may want to show he was "held back" in Toronto and be a proactive guy.

He somehow did the most boring shit I've ever seen.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Darren McCord and farscape1
Malkinstheman said:
I don't know, other than Graves I don't really have a problem with what Dubas did during the summer. Acquiring a game breaker like EK gave him alot of points for me. The team he assembled should have been a wild card team at the worst.
Click to expand...

Pens missed the playoffs last year by 1 point. 1 point. They had a tiny round hole to fill. So all Dubas really had to do was come in and make the Pens 1 point better than last year. But to fill that tiny round hole, Dubas went out and got a big shiny throbbing square peg.

Mixed with a coach that loves jamming square pegs into round holes because he's unable to adapt or change.... it was destined to be a disaster from the start.

Can't say I didn't call it. Because I didn't expect EK to work here. That's not how you build a balanced team with depth which can roll 4 lines without a steep drop off. But whatever.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Gurglesons and BlindWillyMcHurt
Gurglesons said:
Certain GMs would do it. Thought Dubas may want to show he was "held back" in Toronto and be a proactive guy.

He somehow did the most boring shit I've ever seen.
Click to expand...
He's signed for seven years. He's not gonna make his life harder for the teardown and rebuild by swinging for the fences in some vain attempt to eek into the playoffs just to be a sacrificial lamb in the 1st round.

I don't like it, you don't like it, but that was always the way it was gonna be. If he signed on for like 3-4 years, maybe we'd get something worth a damn, but this team's totally comfortable letting the era necrotize in as slow and painful a way as possible. Because making a drastic decision is too spooky.

I don't even really care what Dubas has/hasn't done. I'm not stoked with it, but a guy signed for seven years isn't gonna earn his keep until Sid's done doing his victory lap--and that's not gonna happen until after the 2025-26 season, because Sid will want to be at one final Olympics with guys like McDavid and MacKinnon.

Until then, it's more of the same bullshit. Circling the runway, committing to no real direction, just waiting and watching this team get worse and less watchable the entire time. This team without Sid playing at like a 90pt level would absolutely be picking top-5.

-edit- And no GM was gonna do it. JR might've tried, but he'd have thrown premium assets at f***ing losers like Kapanen, Brassard and Zucker. Then paid premium assets to undo his homerun swing f*** ups, cuz that's JR's MO.
Sidney the Kidney said:
I don't think anything else Dubas said/hinted at in the presser matters a bit once he gave his backing to Sullivan moving forward. That alone pretty much sunk any chance this organization had of being relevant for the next decade+.
Click to expand...
Pretty much what I've been saying since he was hired. Dubas, like pretty much everybody in the hockey world outside of this forum, thinks too highly of Sullivan to realize he's a problem. So we wait until Sid retires and Sullivan walks because he doesn't want to coach a rebuild. (Fingers crossed on the latter part of that sentence.)
 
Big Friggin Dummy said:
Pretty much what I've been saying since he was hired. Dubas, like pretty much everybody in the hockey world outside of this forum, thinks too highly of Sullivan to realize he's a problem. So we wait until Sid retires and Sullivan walks because he doesn't want to coach a rebuild. (Fingers crossed on the latter part of that sentence.)
Click to expand...
I'd think Sullivan would love coaching a rebuild because most rebuilds involve filling the roster with shitty ass "grinders" while their prospects develop in junior/college/AHL. That's like Sullivan's dream situation where he doesn't even have to worry about the Malkins, Karlssons, or Jakes of the world mucking things up with their silly "oh look at me, I know how to be creative with the puck" mumbo jumbo.
 
  • Like
Reactions: farscape1 and Big Friggin Dummy
Sidney the Kidney said:
I'd think Sullivan would love coaching a rebuild because most rebuilds involve filling the roster with shitty ass "grinders" while their prospects develop in junior/college/AHL. That's like Sullivan's dream situation where he doesn't even have to worry about the Malkins, Karlssons, or Jakes of the world mucking things up with their silly "oh look at me, I know how to be creative with the puck" mumbo jumbo.
Click to expand...
I feel pretty confident in saying it would appeal to ownership to have Sully oversee that, yep.
 
Sidney the Kidney said:
I'd think Sullivan would love coaching a rebuild because most rebuilds involve filling the roster with shitty ass "grinders" while their prospects develop in junior/college/AHL. That's like Sullivan's dream situation where he doesn't even have to worry about the Malkins, Karlssons, or Jakes of the world mucking things up with their silly "oh look at me, I know how to be creative with the puck" mumbo jumbo.
Click to expand...
TBH Jake's Sullivan's perfect little loser. All he does is float around and feed off of Sid's scraps. Doesn't try too hard, doesn't do anything flashy.
 
Big Friggin Dummy said:
TBH Jake's Sullivan's perfect little loser. All he does is float around and feed off of Sid's scraps. Doesn't try too hard, doesn't do anything flashy.
Click to expand...
Which is weird that he's not in Sullivan's doghouse. If any other player played like that, they'd be demoted to the 4th line the second they didn't register a point.
 
Sidney the Kidney said:
Which is weird that he's not in Sullivan's doghouse. If any other player played like that, they'd be demoted to the 4th line the second they didn't register a point.
Click to expand...
Sully definitely thinks he made Jake. And I doubt Sully would dare piss off Sid, since pissing off Sid is a one-way ticket outta town asap.
 
Sidney the Kidney said:
I don't think anything else Dubas said/hinted at in the presser matters a bit once he gave his backing to Sullivan moving forward. That alone pretty much sunk any chance this organization had of being relevant for the next decade+.
Click to expand...
What did you expect him to say? He's not going to throw Sullivan under the bus. And if he only says, "Well, we'll see what happens," you now have something hanging over a team trying to make the playoffs. Every loss, every bump, is now magnified and serves as a potential distraction.

Dubas was never going to be critical of Sullivan, and he still left the door open to move on by saying he'll sit down with Sullivan and evaluate the season at the end of the year.
 
DesertedPenguin said:
What did you expect him to say? He's not going to throw Sullivan under the bus. And if he only says, "Well, we'll see what happens," you now have something hanging over a team trying to make the playoffs. Every loss, every bump, is now magnified and serves as a potential distraction.

Dubas was never going to be critical of Sullivan, and he still left the door open to move on by saying he'll sit down with Sullivan and evaluate the season at the end of the year.
Click to expand...
For starters, why is he sitting down with Sullivan to evaluate the season at the end of the year? Why include Sullivan in that statement? He could have just said HE (Dubas) will sit down with his assistants to evaluate the season.

Including Sullivan sounds pretty much like he's getting Sullivan's opinion on where the team/roster needs to go from here.
 
  • Like
Reactions: akapidots and Andy99
PensPlz said:
Pens missed the playoffs last year by 1 point. 1 point. They had a tiny round hole to fill. So all Dubas really had to do was come in and make the Pens 1 point better than last year. But to fill that tiny round hole, Dubas went out and got a big shiny throbbing square peg.

Mixed with a coach that loves jamming square pegs into round holes because he's unable to adapt or change.... it was destined to be a disaster from the start.

Can't say I didn't call it. Because I didn't expect EK to work here. That's not how you build a balanced team with depth which can roll 4 lines without a steep drop off. But whatever.
Click to expand...
I disagree. I feel strongly that since Kessel's departure, the team has sorely lacked a third game breaker. I thought EK was good enough to override the Sullivan effect but apparently the stink is too strong.

The team really didn't have many options cap wise with Petry and Granlund taking up over 11m. Dubas turned a bunch of garbage into EK, I really can't fault him for that.
 
DesertedPenguin said:
What did you expect him to say? He's not going to throw Sullivan under the bus. And if he only says, "Well, we'll see what happens," you now have something hanging over a team trying to make the playoffs. Every loss, every bump, is now magnified and serves as a potential distraction.

Dubas was never going to be critical of Sullivan, and he still left the door open to move on by saying he'll sit down with Sullivan and evaluate the season at the end of the year.
Click to expand...

Fire.

Todd.

Reirden.
 
  • Love
  • Like
Reactions: The Great Mighty Poo and Dennis Reynolds
Whether you want this team to try and perform major surgery in the off-season to see if the Sid era has one more run, or you want the team to begin nuking shit and moving on to the next chapter, pretty much everybody should be rooting for a ton of regulation losses and the team missing by a mile from here on out cuz that's the only way anything of significance, in either direction, gets done.
 
I just don’t think Reirden does anything on his own… I’m sure he has something to say and Sullivan lets him run the white board, but firing him to me would be like ousting Mussolini’s secretary…who the bleep cares lol
 
  • Like
Reactions: FlightlessBird
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest posts

Ad

Upcoming events

Ad

Top Bottom