CRANBERRY, Pa. -- The Penguins are banking on quite a few things to go right this season in order to stay on the cusp of contention.
Will Kasperi Kapanen find a middle ground between his contrasting performances in his first and second season with the Penguins?
Will Jeff Carter rebound from a disappointing second-half in 2021-22 and re-solidify the Penguins' center depth?
Will Jason Zucker stay moderately healthy and finally start to click alongside Evgeni Malkin?
Perhaps most important of all: Will Brian Dumoulin finish out the final season of his contract as a positively impactful presence on the top D-pairing?
As I wrote earlier this week, the Penguins' D-pairing of Marcus Pettersson and Jeff Petry has the potential to be one of the better No. 2 pairings around the league once they've had time to develop some more chemistry and get familiar with each other.
Jan Rutta and one of P.O Joseph, Ty Smith or Mark Friedman should make up a serviceable No. 3 pairing, at worst. But whatever happens with the No. 2 and No. 3 pairings likely won't matter a whole heck of a lot if Dumoulin can no longer hang at an acceptable level while riding shotgun with Kris Letang.
At the end of 2019, Dumoulin had surgery to repair lacerated tendons in his left ankle. He missed 15 consecutive games in 2020 with an undisclosed lower-body injury. And now, he's coming off a grade 3 MCL tear suffered in Game 1 of the Penguins' first-round playoff series against the Rangers this past May.
Dumoulin, 31, might be seeing the lasting effects of his lower-body injuries combining with the natural decline that comes with age.
The 6-foot-4 defender has never been the most gifted with the puck on his stick, but for several seasons he was one of the better defensive defensemen in the NHL and was no slouch in regard to using his long stride to create separation from forecheckers and break the puck out of the zone with a good first pass.
And even if he wasn't dishing the puck around the offensive zone like Letang, he still made positive contributions further up the ice by making calculated pinches to sustain pressure and make transitioning the puck a difficult task for the opposition.
Before tearing his MCL in the postseason, Dumoulin managed to stay healthy and suited up for 76 games in 2021-22, but it was what I'd consider the most inconsistent season of his career.
On the surface, things appeared to be just fine for Dumoulin. When he was on the ice at 5-on-5 last season, the Penguins scored 56.1% of the goals, but a look under the hood shows that the Penguins controlled 51.9% of the expected goals and were actually out-attempted (49.8%). It was the first time in Dumoulin's career the Penguins attempted fewer shots than they allowed when he was on the ice. These numbers are raw, and aren't adjusted for contextual factors such as quality of competition or zone deployment, but regardless, that's not quite what you're hoping to get out of a top-pairing defender.
Part of the reason for this is that Dumoulin's isolated offensive impact ranked in just the 15th percentile of NHL defensemen, per JFreshHockey. That's comfortably below replacement-level. On the defensive side he ranked in the 69th percentile. That's certainly acceptable, but a much harder pill to swallow considering his role on the top pairing and poor impacts toward generating quality offense.
Before either of John Marino and Mike Matheson were traded away this past offseason, I was told the Penguins had a fair level of concern about Dumoulin's game and that Ron Hextall and co. entertained the idea of trading him. What concerned management more, though, was the lack of a viable partner on the left side of the top pairing for Letang.
The other left-handed, NHL-caliber defensemen the Penguins employ are Pettersson, Joseph and Smith. Pettersson consistently puts up strong defensive results, but most of the time it isn't against high-end competition. Ideally, he can take care of business against middle-of-the-road competition and that's that. I'm not as high on Smith as others, but there is some intrigue around what he brings offensively. Defensively, however, he's got a lot to clean up. He's nowhere close to being a capable partner for Letang. Joseph has spent a small amount of time with Letang during his stints in the NHL, but after struggling to solidify a spot in the lineup for himself last season, it's tough to see him making a permanent jump to the top pairing. Plus, he's not known for his work on the defensive side of the puck.
There is the option to play Rutta on his weak side with Letang, although that feels like a temporary fix rather than a permanent solution.
After weighing the options, hoping Dumoulin rebounds seems like the best way forward. Can he do it?
Most of the Penguins' skaters stunk out loud during their 6-2 preseason loss to the Red Wings on Tuesday night. While Dumoulin wasn't terrible, his skating noticeably hampered him throughout the game. It was his first game action since suffering an MCL tear in May, so he's got the benefit of the doubt to hone in his timing over the next month or so, but some of the things I saw have me worried he'll get back to a level the Penguins ideally need him to be at.
Before the rough stuff, it's important to acknowledge that Dumoulin's hockey sense still allows him to kill a lot of plays in transition before they fully develop, as well as the fact that he is still very effective at clearing the front of the net in his zone:
At the beginning of the play, Dumoulin makes a great read to step up and pressure the carrier at an angle while keeping his momentum going with the flow of the puck (notice the direction of his toe caps). In doing so, he essentially forced the carrier to continue skating up the boards before getting sealed off, or cut to the middle and take their chances. The carrier opted to make a move to the middle, but a well-timed pivot from Dumoulin allowed him to knock the puck away at center ice.
The Red Wings managed to gain the zone anyway, and you can see Dumoulin did a really good job of clearing the net-front attacker out of Casey DeSmith's way right before a long-distance shot came through. This skill is why Dumoulin remains a very impactful penalty-killer.
Our next clip, though, shows Dumoulin making another good play to deny entry to the Penguins' zone, but just seconds later he threw an errant pass through the middle of the ice that put the Red Wings on a quick counter-attack:
The puck ended up bouncing right back to Dumoulin a few seconds later. Instead of getting his head up and scanning for an outlet or open ice to skate the puck, he kept his head down and banged a weak clearing attempt off the boards, right back to a Red Wings skater. I get the idea to try and create a 50/50 puck out in the neutral zone with all three Red Wings forwards deep in the Penguins' zone, but Dumoulin failed to recognize that the closest pressure to him was actually peeling off and headed to the exact spot he was moving the puck to.
Because his skating isn't what it once was, Dumoulin felt an urgency to move the puck in a hurry because he couldn't -- or at least he thought he couldn't -- escape pressure on his own. When you move the puck in a hurried panic, it typically ends up in a bad spot. This is causing him to waste far too many puck possessions.
Wasted puck possessions are going to happen, but sequences just seemed to die on Dumoulin's stick more often than not on Tuesday night.
I'll let you take a look at this next clip before I chime in:
Anything stand out? Like how long it took Dumoulin to pivot and then transition as an attacker got around him easily? Once upon a time, Dumoulin was as smooth and fluid a skater as you could hope for from someone his size. But that clunkiness ... that is worrisome. It could become a serious problem against speedy and skilled competition that will look to attack him head-on in hopes of manipulating his feet and getting his stride out of whack.
Another thing to note from that clip is Dumoulin getting knocked off balance and nearly falling to the ice as he returned to the net-front. It seemed like he spent all game getting knocked off balance and picking himself up.
This problem can't solely be chalked up to it being his first game back in action from his MCL tear, either. In Game 1 of the postseason this past May before the injury, the Rangers were able to set up shop in the offensive zone after they chipped the puck past Dumoulin and forced him to transition backward:
Dumoulin was targeted a fair amount by opponents entering the zone last season. He recorded a respectable number of denials, but also saw the opposition carry into the zone against him with possession and get a scoring chance much more frequently than that of a truly elite entry denier.
Like I said earlier, Dumoulin deserves more than a single preseason game to get back into the feel of things. That said, there were some pretty big warning flags flying around last season. A year older and after another injury, it's tough to see his current issues improving much, but the Penguins are really going to need it to happen for their D-corps to be as solid as they originally hoped.
