There are plenty of issues to point at in identifying the reasons the Penguins will likely miss the postseason for the first time since Sidney Crosby's rookie season.
Chief among them is the construction of the roster and the fact it wasn't strong enough to supplement completely healthy and productive seasons from Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. However, their inability to consistently convert quality offensive chances into goals has become a rather large problem dating back to last season, and that goes beyond this team's lack of depth.
In a game they couldn't afford to lose against an inferior opponent and below-average goalie, the Penguins' finishing struggles were glaring as the tanking Blackhawks beat them, 5-2, on Tuesday night here at PPG Paints Arena.
"I thought we had a lot of scoring chances," Mike Sullivan would say, "we just had a tough time finding the back of the net."
Just as it's been the case so many other times this season, the Penguins lost a game they would've otherwise won if they had scored on par with the looks they generated. According to Evolving-Hockey, they created 4.1 expected goals, but obviously only cashed in for half of that.
There was this Crosby opportunity that wouldn't go:
This Kris Letang look that was shut down:
Another Crosby chance that just missed:
And this mad scramble around the net that somehow didn't result in the lamp being lit:
I won't bore you with a clip of each remaining opportunity that got stuffed into Petr Mrazek's pads, but rest assured, the chances were there.
"We get those chances. Sometimes the goalie is playing well, like he did tonight," Letang said following the loss. "It's just that once those games happen, you cannot change your game because you have to keep playing the same way. ... You can't get frustrated and change the way that we play."
Letang is right in the sense that no team should overhaul their plan of attack after a handful of disappointing games in which actual output didn't meet expectations. That would be incredibly reactionary. But this isn't a handful of games we're talking about when it comes to these Penguins. Heck, we're not even talking about just this season.
During the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season, the Penguins were one of the NHL's best finishing teams. That flipped on its head last season, as they scored just shy of eight fewer goals than expected based on the quality of their chances. With the top of the lineup featuring so many players with a proven history of being plus-finishers, it seemed like a legitimate possibility they were just a bit unlucky (yes, that can span over an entire season).
But now it's starting to seem like luck is just a minor factor along with a fundamental issue at hand.
This season, the Penguins have scored 44.9 fewer goals than expected. That is staggering. Even a more positive outlook from HockeyViz's expected goal model has them at 26.9 fewer goals than expected.
Now, it's worth noting the average quality of an unblocked shot attempt has gone up league-wide this season, so there are a decent chunk of teams lagging behind their expected output, but only a couple of them have struggled to convert as much as the Penguins.
Let's just run with HockeyViz's estimate for a moment. The Penguins currently have a minus-one goal differential for the season. If they'd even scored on half of the 26.9 goals that never came to fruition, they'd have a plus-12 goal differential and would likely have a spot in the postseason secured. That's not changing anything about the makeup of the roster, that's not changing anything about the wishy-washy goaltending they've gotten all season. That's just the finishing aspect.
Here's a look at how many goals each regular Penguins forward has scored relative to their expected output, again going with the friendlier estimate from HockeyViz:
• Sidney Crosby: +3
• Jason Zucker: +1.2
• Ryan Poehling: -0.6
• Josh Archibald: -0.9
• Evgeni Malkin: -1
• Drew O'Connor: -1.4
• Danton Heinen: -1.6
• Mikael Granlund: -1.8
• Jeff Carter: -3
• Rickard Rakell: -3
• Jake Guentzel: -6
• Bryan Rust: -7.1
There's 16 goals that slipped away just from the three players on the bottom of that list, all of whom play in the top six. Regardless, it's far from great that Crosby and Zucker are the only two forwards actually taking care of business in that department.
Let me re-emphasize that this has nothing to do with a lack of prime scoring chances. They shoot the puck from the net-front and slot (the most dangerous areas of the ice, of course) as much as any team in the league. HockeyViz has them generating 2.88 expected goals per hour at 5-on-5, but they're scoring only 2.62 actual goals per hour.
That's the difference between being a top-seven team in the league in the rate at which they score and being smack-dab in the middle of the field.
This is a complex and nuanced matter here, but simply getting a bunch of looks from prime areas clearly isn't enough. It hasn't been for most of this season, and it wasn't for good chunks of last season.
"The only area I thought we could've done a better job was just getting inside a little more and just getting to the blue paint, so we could deliver pucks to the net, give us an opportunity to break the coverage down that way," Sullivan said.
Although the Penguins shoot from prime real estate plenty, they like to play on the perimeter off the cycle to set those looks up. Is it possible opposing teams have snuffed them out, and are now collapsing the slot and net-front area, making it harder to convert once the puck is worked to those areas? It's definitely a possibility and might even be a reasonable assumption.
That said, I don't know what the solution is. The players and Sullivan don't, either, because one would think something would've been done about it by this point.
Nevertheless, their finishing struggles loom large on a lengthy list of items that ultimately compounded to likely end their historic run of qualifying for the playoffs in 16 consecutive seasons.
