The Jets' Blake Wheeler scores the second of his three goals on Matt Murray. - AP

Penguins

Kovacevic: Sullivan, Rutherford need to start the hard push

Oct 30, 2017 • 1:00 am

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WINNIPEG, Manitoba -- See, Mike Sullivan's been right all along.

It's not so much that the Penguins have been victimized by the NHL's freakish schedule that has them playing 19 sets of back-to-back games, including four in the opening month against rested opponents.

Nope. It's that these back-to-backs are basically picking at existing scabs.

"It's not the back-to-backs. It really isn't. These problems have been there the whole season so far," Carl Hagelin was telling me after his team was flattened by the Jets, 7-1, Sunday night at Bell MTS Place, this on the night after just plain old falling flat, 2-1, at Minnesota. "It feels like we need something good to happen, something to give us that confidence."

Hagelin was sitting at his stall in the tiny visitors' locker room originally built for AHL purposes, most of his sweaty uniform still sticking to him. Many of his mates were doing the same. But despite the close quarters, barely a sound seemed audible beyond Sidney Crosby giving his standard sermon, swarmed by cameras and microphones. In the corridor just outside, Jim Rutherford paced back and forth. In a room down that corridor, Sullivan and his staff met behind a closed door.

I'm describing nothing out of the ordinary here, mind you. This was business as usual.

But then, that's the problem: This was business as usual. And maybe it's well past time to begin taking it a little more seriously, even with the 7-5-1 record at hand. Maybe when a team regularly gets embarrassed from faceoff to final horn, something bad is steadily bubbling beneath the occasional Phil Kessel overtime breakaway.

So let's start with the whole herd of elephants hanging out in the living room: The Penguins are now 0-4 in the second half of back-to-back sets and have been outscored, 29-7.

That's pathetic.

The league seriously needs to rethink this lopsided mess in future schedule construction, but I'll reiterate in the same breath that the Penguins' on-ice response to this is indefensible. On average, an NHL team wins only 43 percent of its so-called 'tired' games. But they do win them. And they generally don't concede more touchdowns on a Sunday than their city's NFL team.

Oh, and there's this: The Penguins are now the league's worst five-on-five team.

Can't even make that up.

They've now scored 17 goals at five-on-five and allowed 38, a minus-21 differential that, on this night, dropped them below the Canadiens for 31st and worst. In the past six games, they've scored four five-on-five goals.

This stuff isn't accidental. There's something really wrong.

That applies to individuals, too, including a few who are generally above reproach.

Up front, Crosby's now got one point, an assist, in his past five games. Evgeni Malkin's got both of the Penguins' goals on this trip, but he's been no better and, again, in this game, was guilty of a bunch of giveaways. Jake Guentzel has one goal in his past eight games and, for this one, was dropped to the third line. Bryan Rust's got one goal all season, and he was bumped up to the first line, which is telling in itself. The depth forwards have contributed next to nothing.

On defense, well, I could break down all the breakdowns or simply reiterate that Kris Letang remains barely a shadow of his former self, as witnessed anew on this stunning second-period sequence between him and Winnipeg's Mark Scheifele:

Yikes.

In goal, Matt Murray's ranged from good to great more often than not. But he's now played in the second half of two of these four back-to-backs, and he gave up six goals in Chicago, then four on just six shots here before getting yanked by Sullivan.

That wasn't Antti Niemi out there this time. It was Murray.

This could have been his night, too, in his first back-to-back starts since April 2-3, 2016, to play the stopper. Sullivan had uncharacteristically criticized the team for its 'one-and-done' forays into the Minnesota zone, and he clearly sought something a little extra at his most important position.

Instead, Blake Wheeler had hats snowing down to the ice before the first intermission:

OK, enough. One gets the picture, especially when it's tripled like that.

What needs to happen next?

Sullivan and Jim Rutherford have both been seething since Minnesota, and this debacle only magnified that. Both look as if they're about to have flames bursting from their ears.

But it's becoming clearer by the day that simply bearing down and urging the players to do more, to be better, won't cut it. Even if it coaxes a nice rebound win or two over the remainder of this trip -- Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver are next -- more will be needed before long.

Sullivan's got the first chance at change. He's stuck by this lineup since the opening game, and it isn't working. He needs to do a whole lot more than the minor line shuffle he tried for this one.

His options are limited, especially on defense with Justin Schultz out. But they aren't zero. The team's been dragging poor Josh Archibald around all season without getting him into a single game. Archibald isn't anyone's grand answer, but he holds a lot of the natural traits -- skating hard, going to the net -- that the coach is trying to urge out of others. Ryan Reaves was a beast against Nashville, but he's done little against most other foes. Greg McKegg, Tom Kuhnhackl and all the rest ... don't tell me these guys are fixtures.

In the two years Sullivan's been in Pittsburgh, he's had a firm answer for most every question I've asked.

Watch this:

The candor at the start of that was appreciated. It's his human side that makes him so relatable, most importantly to his players. But the next move might require a different demeanor.

Rutherford, like Sullivan, will get a pass in Pittsburgh for a long time, and they should. But it shouldn't go unmentioned, particularly on this night, that Rutherford's solution for goaltending depth was an old, slow Niemi, something the coaches could see for themselves on his first day of camp. That's a bad move, even if he's been spared its worst ramifications by the Panthers insanely picking up Niemi.

This needs to be addressed. As in now. Casey DeSmith acquitted himself reasonably well in his NHL debut here in relief of Murray, but he can't be part of any conversation moving forward that's related to contending for another Stanley Cup.

I'm fine with Rutherford waiting on the third-line center. I've held that stance all along, and I'm not about to change. This is the big move, and the big move will involve the full allotment of the Penguins' $2 million in cap space. But that doesn't mean there aren't better answers at forward in Wilkes-Barre, including you-know-who scoring virtually at will in the AHL.

There are a lot of things Daniel Sprong can't do yet at the NHL level, but scoring isn't on that list. He'd have produced more offense five-on-five the past couple weeks than about half the current forwards.

I won't go overboard with suggestions. Sullivan and Rutherford are the smart hockey men wearing very large rings. They're the ones to come up with ideas, including doing what's best for Sprong as a prospect.

But ideas would be welcome.

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WHAT'S BREWING?

• Yeah, there was a football game, too, I'm told. Check our Steelers team page for comprehensive coverage of a rather stirring victory over the Lions by Dale Lolley, Christopher Carter and Matt Sunday in Detroit.

• If you missed any college coverage over the weekend Audrey Snyder was all over Penn State's excruciating loss in Columbus, and Chris Mueller did likewise with Pitt's uplifting victory over Virginia.

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