The Penguins are facing their most important offseason in franchise history, one that will add the finishing touches to the Sidney Crosby era, one way or the other.
While a couple of iconic figures, in addition to a pair of top-six wingers, are free to sign with any team they like upon the start of NHL free agency on July 13, the team's in full control of Kasperi Kapanen's future. Kapanen, 25, is a restricted free agent after completing a three-year contract that paid $3.2 million per season. If Ron Hextall and Brian Burke wish to hang onto Kapanen, they must submit a qualifying offer to him that is at least 100% of the annual value of his previous contract. If they don't, he'll become an unrestricted.
Or so I thought. Our Taylor Haase discovered that the Penguins will have the opportunity to submit a much cheaper qualifying offer to Kapanen.
“Nothing yet," Kapanen told reporters at the team's end-of-season media availability Tuesday when asked if he'd heard from the front office about a new deal. "It’s still early. They’ve gotta take care of a couple bigger pieces than me first, and then, hopefully, we’ll figure something out."
It was a long, frustrating season for Kapanen in which he produced only two more points (32) than the previous season despite playing 39 more games (79).
"I think I had really good games this year, and I think I had really bad games, so I think that’s something I really need to focus on," Kapanen said. "Somehow just getting my confidence back, getting my swagger that I used to have. I don’t think it was there this year, and I think it showed."
He went on to blame himself for "getting in my own head."
Kapanen scored 0.57 goals per hour across 1,148 minutes this season, the lowest rate of his career and lower than any of the Penguins' regular forwards not named Teddy Blueger. The rate at which he put up points, 1.67 per hour, was as low as it's been since his first full season in 2017-18 and lower than all forwards except Brock McGinn.
Simply put, this guy was nowhere to be found:
The version of Kapanen the Penguins got this season looked a lot more like this:
That's in overtime. Game 7.
The giant red flag is Kapanen staring directly at the puck while he had plenty of room to skate and survey the ice. Just another indicator that there's zero confidence running through the player who appeared to be a consistent rush threat a season ago.
Kapanen has quick feet and can really burn it up the ice. There aren't many players across the league that have faster top-end speed. But straight-line speed alone isn't enough to be effective in today's NHL. In the clip above, not once did Kapanen change speeds to try and create a differential against the defender. It was only a mad-dash forward that saw his space to operate quickly vanish. By that point, he forced a shot that never made its way toward the net, another all too familiar sight.
Puck control was a major hinderance to Kapanen's success this season. If it wasn't failure to get a shot off, it was often failure to even keep the puck on his stick when driving into the zone or toward the net:
Losing the puck in that instance is one thing. Losing it in such pedestrian fashion, almost as if he knew it would happen, is something else.
Those clips come a little over a week after Kapanen was playing what many called the best hockey he played all season. Through the first four games of the Penguins' opening-round matchup against the Rangers, Kapanen hadn't found the back of the net, but was creating chances in addition to providing an effective forecheck:
Mike Sullivan was convinced the goals would come for Kapanen if he continued playing that way. He didn't continue playing that way and, unsurprisingly, the goals didn't come.
It's clear his lack of confidence goes hand-in-hand with the puck turning into a bouncy ball whenever it touches the blade of his stick.
Interestingly, Kapanen had the best defensive season of his career and it wasn't particularly close. After multiple seasons of being one of the league's least impactful wingers on the defensive side of the puck, his defensive impacts graded out above league-average this season. I think that came out of necessity when Kapanen couldn't seem to get it going offensively early in the year. He knew if he didn't clean up other areas of his game there would be no point in wasting a lineup spot on him.
The Penguins could deal with defensive deficiencies from a one-trick rush pony, but that trick quickly became turning the puck over.
Look at Kapanen's minimal effort and nonexistent attention to detail in the Penguins' second game of the season in Sunrise, Fla.:
By the middle of the season, Kapanen shored up his defensive issues and was hardly a liability in his own end. That's not to suggest he was earning himself any Selke votes, though.
Here's a very similar play as the clip above, where Kapanen got to the loose puck along the wall in time and used his body to separate the puck from a New York skater in Game 7:
After forcing the Rangers to cough the puck up, Kapanen quickly found the puck right back on his stick and skated it out of traffic. He then picked his head up and made a safe pass to his defenseman before the Penguins were able to exit the zone.
That effort is the difference between spending minimal time in your zone and hemorrhaging shots against.
On Tuesday, I asked Kapanen if his improved defensive work this season might have come at the expense of his offensive generation.
"I guess so. I still would’ve liked to produce a little more offensively, but I think it’s in the right direction, I understand why it was like that. So, just something positive from this season."
Kapanen's reads without the puck also vastly improved over the course of the season:
Last season, we would have seen Kapanen dart toward the Rangers defenseman with the puck, opening up the right side of the ice for a transition pass even though Evgeni Malkin was charging that way. Instead, Kapanen held up and occupied the ice in between the puck-carrier and the outlet on his side. With nowhere to go, the Rangers forced the puck up the opposite side and quickly turned it over.
Again, not necessarily excelling without the puck, but at least competent. And he simply had to be without an offensive pulse.
"I feel like guys are just getting faster year by year. Either I’m slowing down or they’re getting faster, so that’s something I gotta work on," Kapanen responded when asked what he needs to do to prepare for next season. "Like I said, just getting my swagger back and getting back to the things that make me feel confident and work on those."
Kapanen is projected to receive a two-year contract this offseason with an AAV of $3.673 million, according to Evolving Hockey. On a one-year deal, they project a cap-hit of $3.238 million.
Neither of those contracts sound like something the Penguins should jump at. If Kapanen could consistently play at or near his ceiling, his value would surpass the dollar figures significantly, but he's shown nothing to suggest he can do so.
Although, as Taylor discovered, there's no reason to not submit the bargain-bin qualifying offer and try to squeeze some value out of it.