Penguins could focus on defense heading into NHL Draft
Mike Sullivan will step onto the First Niagara Center floor for the first round of the NHL Entry Draft on Friday night in Buffalo as the envy of every other coach in the league.
He will receive dozens of congratulatory handshakes and pats on the back from those impressed by the job he did leading the Penguins to the Stanley Cup less than two weeks earlier.
But someday, chances are, he will be fired. Sooner than anyone would predict right now in the afterglow of a championship season.
The shelf life of NHL coaches is extraordinarily short. Only four of the league's 30 coaches have spent more than five years in their current position: Arizona's Dave Tippett, Boston's Claude Julien, Chicago's Joel Quenneville and the New York Islanders' Jack Capuano.
That dirty little fact of NHL life will have an impact on the decisions the Penguins make as they are scheduled to select five players in the final six rounds of the draft Saturday.
When Sullivan took over as coach in December, he brought with him a style of play that values speed and puck possession above all else. The Penguins might end up drafting players who excel in those areas, but it won't be because of Sullivan's influence.
“If you actually do that, you run the risk of having a completely inconsistent player delivery mechanism, and you're drafting players who are now turning pro and that coach isn't here anymore,” said Randy Sexton, the Penguins director of amateur scouting.
“There are organizations around our league who do that. The coach wants big size, so we want heavy guys. They draft heavy guys for three years. It's summer Year 3, and he gets fired. Now they've got all these big, heavy guys coming out, and the new coach wants speed and skill. The organization is sunk.
“So you really can't pick players based on a particular style of play a coach wants. It's really more around an identity of the Penguins, and that vision came from Ray Shero originally, and now it's coming from Jim Rutherford.”
Since Shero took over for Craig Patrick before the 2006 draft, the Penguins generally have favored speed, smarts and lineup versatility when making picks. That's unlikely to change this weekend.
What could change is the position on which the Penguins focus.
In the past two drafts, the Penguins have used eight of their nine picks on forwards. This year, with the prospect pool on defense as shallow as it has been in years, it stands to reason the team will make additions to the blue line.
Sexton was quick to caution, however, that the Penguins are more likely to select the best player available than a player who fits a positional need.
“I'd much rather have Jim say to me, ‘Randy, you've done a great job finding us players,' than, ‘Randy, you've done a great job finding us a whole bunch of defensemen who aren't good enough to play in the NHL,' ” Sexton said. “We've got to find players. That's our mandate. That's our job. In a perfect world, they would be equally distributed across positions, but we don't live or work in a perfect world.”
Last year's draft worked out close to perfectly for the Penguins.
Of the 211 players selected last June, only eight played in the NHL last season. Two — second-rounder Daniel Sprong and sixth-rounder Dominik Simon — were Penguins.
Sexton said that wasn't by design. The Penguins aren't trying to fast-track prospects, and they're not focusing on selecting older players, such as the 21-year-old Simon, over traditional 18-year-old draftees.
“We liked them as players, and we project them to be NHL players. The pleasant surprise we all got was that they played games in their first year,” Sexton said. “The fact they only played a handful of games tells us they're not ready yet, but it is reassuring that the analysis we went through and the projection we applied appears to be accurate at a very early stage in the development process. It's very positive early feedback on the process.”
Jonathan Bombulie is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at jbombulie@tribweb.com or via Twitter at @BombulieTrib.
