Personnel changes are a staple of the offseason in the NHL
Every year.
For every team.
Contracts expire. Veterans retire. General managers assess and address their club's needs, and some make moves to squeeze under the salary-cap ceiling.
And so it is that the Penguins team that lost its opening-round playoff series to the New York Islanders will not be the one that opens the 2021-22 regular season this fall.
The only uncertainty is the magnitude of what is to come.
Does Ron Hextall settle for a few relatively minor tweaks, in the belief that a group that finished first in the highly competitive East Division has the makings of a Stanley Cup contender next season?
Or does he conclude that it's time for a major overhaul, if not a complete rebuild, because the Penguins haven't made it past Round 1 since 2018?
Or -- and this seems to be the mostly likely approach, at least for now -- does he settle somewhere in the middle, pulling off a high-impact move or two but not blowing up the entire operation?
"There are questions to be answered," Kris Letang said Friday, when the team conducted exit interviews and players attended to other traditional Breakup Day activities. "I'm not in charge of those."
What the people who are -- Hextall, in particular -- have in mind for the offseason isn't clear, because they haven't spoken publicly since the Penguins were eliminated, although that figures to change by early next week.
The guys who could be directly affected by trades and other such moves -- the players -- were predictably reluctant to discuss areas of the depth chart that they believe should get attention before training camp convenes.
"That's a little above my pay grade," Mike Matheson said. (His pay grade, by the way, is whichever one covers a cap hit of $4,875,000.)
Fair enough, but he surely appreciates that roster adjustments are a regular feature in his line of work, having been traded from Florida to the Penguins less than a year ago.
"You know the game is a business," Jake Guentzel said. "You never know what's going to happen. You never want to be an early exit, and the last three years, that (has been the) case."
Of those three Round 1 losses, this one probably stings the most, because the Penguins played pretty well for the majority of it.
"I think we carried the play most of the series," Letang said.
But they still lost four games, including a pair at PPG Paints Arena. One of those defeats came in overtime, the other in double-overtime.
"If we win one of those overtime games, it's a different series," Brian Dumoulin said.
Sure, but that will never get beyond the hypothetical. And while the Penguins are moving into another long offseason, the Islanders are preparing for a best-of-seven series against Boston.
"You could say a lot of things," Brandon Tanev said. "At the end of the day, we just didn't get the job done. I think that's all you can say. It's unfortunate, for the result, because we did have a great team and we all thought we were going to go for a deep run."
That's understandable, given their pre-playoff success, which they faced relentless adversity and still finished first in the East Division.
"With the regular season we had, we really felt like we had something going," Marcus Pettersson said.
Any chance they had of getting past Round 1 disappeared when Tristan Jarry's game unraveled -- if the goaltender isn't playing well, it really doesn't matter what the 18 skaters do -- but that wasn't their only shortcoming against the Islanders.
"They won the most net-front battles, and stuff like that," Pettersson said. "That's something they beat us in, and beat us in the series, eventually."
And so their 2020-21 season dissolved into disappointment, as it has every year since they claimed the franchise's fifth Stanley Cup in 2017. If anything, this one hurts a little more than most, because the Penguins were convinced they were contenders.
"We had a great team," Letang said. "It was a great opportunity."
The challenge for Hextall and his staff is to give them another one next season.
