Saturday, February 25, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
With the Steelers' season memorably behind us and with the baseball season in the early days of spring training, it's about the right time to discuss Pittsburgh's least successful pro sports franchise.
We're talking about a team that has taken losing to new heights, a team that has displayed inadequacy in every phase of the game, a team that rightfully calls last place home.
We're talking about, of course, the ... Penguins.
That's right, the Penguins.
Pretty much while no one was noticing the Penguins have eclipsed the Pirates as the city's worst franchise. No, the Penguins can't match the Pirates' long string of futility, which includes 13 consecutive losing seasons. But it's what the Penguins have done lately that is so, uh, impressive.
Truth be known, for sheer incompetence the Pirates can't match the Penguins.
The Pirates have finished last in divisional play once in the past seven years. The Penguins are headed for a fourth consecutive last-place finish. What's more, every year they get worse.
In 2001-02, coach Ivan Hlinka was fired after four games and the Penguins won 28 times on their way to a fifth-place finish in the five-team Atlantic Division. They fell to 27 wins in 2003 and 23 in 2004, with both totals leaving them in last place. This season, with 23 games remaining, the Penguins have 14 wins and might not reach 20. Not only are they in last place in the Atlantic Division, they have fewer points than any team in the NHL.
The mark of a truly bad team is one that continually gets worse. The Penguins are that.
What is so special about these woeful records is that often there has been legitimate high expectations for the team, something only a small band of cockeyed optimists have had for the Pirates.
In 2001-02, the Penguins were coming off an appearance in the conference finals and, with Mario Lemieux back with the team, there were expectations of something similar. Then, Hlinka was fired. He was replaced by Rick Kehoe, a loyal soldier of the Penguins' organization but with no qualifications for the job other than a close proximity to general manager Craig Patrick, who doesn't like to get bogged down in messy job searches.
This season, expectations were over the top. Not only had the Penguins drafted Sidney Crosby -- the rare player who has lived up to his hype -- they had acquired a handful of high-priced veterans who figured to take the team deep in the playoffs, if not all the way. That was particularly true because the team, we were told, had such an outstanding crop of young talent.
After going 11-46-5 in 2003-04, these young Penguins had rallied to go 12-5-3 in their final 20 games. It was a remarkable turnaround and, we were led to believe, this was a team that would only get better in the future.
The leading scorers from that team were Dick Tarnstrom, Aleksey Morozov, Ryan Malone, Milan Kraft, Rico Fata, Ric Jackman and Konstantin Koltsov.
Not exactly a group to build around, though. The remaining players from that group are Malone, experiencing an immensely disappointing season, Jackman, who can barely get on the ice, and Koltsov, the once-heralded No. 1 draft choice who has no goals and two assists in 37 games.
Like the Pirates, the Penguins have become superb in building up the hopes of fans with bogus prospects.
Pittsburgh, we're told incessantly, is a blue-collar town that cherishes defense. The Penguins are 30th and last in the NHL in goals allowed, as they were in 2003-04. In the two seasons before that, they were 29th and 26th. Even the Pirates' harshest critics would have to admit they haven't been close to that level of incompetence in some time.
We hear a lot of cheerleading about how the Penguins are set for the future with Crosby, goalie Marc-Andre Fleury and prospect Evgeni Malkin, said to be the equal of Crosby. No question, that has the look of a formidable threesome. But it takes more than three players.
That's what is so troubling. When it comes to building a team, the Penguins are clueless. In the front office, Patrick's moves continue to defy belief. For administrative incompetence, the Penguins have it all over the Pirates.
If the team's future is at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, its top minor-league club, why is this young talent being groomed by Joe Mullen? Mullen was a Hall of Fame player, but he has no credentials as a head coach and his only experience as a Penguins assistant were under Kehoe and Eddie Olczyk, two failed regimes.
The only hope is the somewhat level playing field put in place after a work stoppage eliminated the 2004-05 season. Such circumstances should allow a team to become competitive. But with one as mired deeply in defeat as the Penguins, that's a hard concept to grasp.
Sidney Crosby will need better players around him if the Penguins want to get better.
(Bob Smizik can be reached at bsmizik@post-gazette.com.)
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