Penguins/NHL category, Page 220

We might be short on sports right now, but Mark Madden isn’t short on opinions. In this week’s “Madden Monday” podcast, Mark and I get into great detail about the Penguins’ looming offseason. General manager Jim Rutherford and head coach Mike Sullivan both make it sound like roster adjustments are...

The Penguins have relinquished the rights to prospects Ryan Jones and Nikita Pavlychev and allowed both players to become unrestricted free agents. Jones and Pavlychev were each drafted by the Penguins and played at the NCAA level the past four seasons. The NHL’s deadline to sign drafted college players was...

The NBA’s San Antonio Spurs missed the playoffs for the first time in 22 seasons. Here in Pittsburgh, we know whose fault that is. It’s Jack Johnson’s. The Penguins defenseman is responsible for the national debt, social injustice, the spread of covid-19 from China, the Pirates’ low payroll and, not...

A favorite crutch for Penguins coach Mike Sullivan is “moving forward.” He uses it as a transition. As punctuation. As a point of emphasis. All the time. Unfortunately, his team has spent the last three years moving backward. Badly. From Stanley Cup champion in 2017. To a second-round exit in...

Longtime NHL defenseman Dan Hamhuis announced his retirement through the Nashville Predators on Thursday. Over 16 seasons, Hamhuis appeared in 1,148 regular season games and scored 356 points (59 goals, 297 assists). A stout defensive defenseman throughout his career, Hamhuis, 37, primarily played for the Predators throughout his career but...

You knew that venom would be spewed toward the Penguins in “U mad, bro?” this week. The team was dreadful in its four-game, qualifying-round elimination at the hands of the 24th-seeded Montreal Canadiens last week. Fans are ticked off. They should be. My only question was, “Which Penguins were going...

The Pittsburgh Penguins have opted to retain their first-round draft pick for this year’s draft, according to Pierre Lebrun of TSN. They will instead send their first-round pick in 2021 to the Minnesota Wild to complete a trade they made in February for forward Jason Zucker. A condition of a...

A day after general manager Jim Rutherford said change was needed for his team, the Penguins did just that with their coaching staff. On Wednesday, the team announced assistant coaches Sergei Gonchar, Jacques Martin and Mark Recchi will not have their contracts renewed. A search for new assistants to work...

I didn’t think anything could make me more frustrated than watching the fifth-seeded Penguins lose to the 24th-seeded Montreal Canadiens in the qualifying round of the 2020 NHL season. Until I listened to Jim Rutherford talk about it. On Tuesday, the Penguins general manager gave a frank assessment of how...

Jim Rutherford didn’t have many answers on Tuesday. In all reality, he’s probably still asking lots of his own questions of his team that was meekly dispatched from the playoffs by the Montreal Canadiens last week. But he still had plenty to say when he spoke with reporters via teleconference...

The fix is in! The Penguins and the rest of the NHL got robbed! The NHL wanted Alexis Lafrenière to go to New York City the whole time! Those are the cries of foul play flying around the NHL after Monday’s draft lottery. The New York Rangers won it. And...

That playoff series between the Penguins and Montreal didn’t go quite as expected. For example, I picked the Penguins in two. But nobody picked Montreal. Not one single person. No one thought the Canadiens would win, not even those in their dressing room. (Not until after Game 1, anyway.) It’s...

Penguins forward prospect Radim Zohorna will remain his native Czech Republic and train with his previous team, BK Mlada Boleslav of the ELH, to open the 2020-21 season according to a release from the team. The release did not specify if Zohorna will play with BK Mlada Boleslav. That team’s...

You can probably guess the main focus of this week’s “Madden Monday” podcast: What happened to the Pittsburgh Penguins and where do they go from here? The “what happened” part is all encompassing when it comes to the Pens’ four-game series loss to the Montreal Canadiens last week. It was...

Blow it up! Tear it down! Total reboot! We hear those reactions from Penguins fans after almost every season-ending playoff exit. Those calls for drastic change are often hyperbolic emotion. Prisoner-of-the-moment stuff. Presently, though, demands from fans and media to reconstruct the team resonate more logically after the club’s putrid...

Mike Sullivan was relieved. On March 10, in the aftermath of a tidy 5-2 road win against the New Jersey Devils, the Penguins coach stood outside the visiting dressing room of the Prudential Center in downtown Newark, N.J., and offered body language that suggested he finally resolved a great conundrum....

Observations from the Penguins’ 2-0 loss to the Canadiens: There will be plenty of time to dissect this franchise’s malfunctions over the past 28 months and how they’ve fallen from the league’s upper tier of true Stanley Cup contenders. In fact, there will be three months to do that before...

The Penguins’ season-ending 2-0 loss to the Montreal Canadiens in Game 4 of their qualifying round series in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena brought clarity to one of the conditional transactions they made prior to February’s trade deadline. And it introduced plenty of intrigue to another. The conditional draft pick they dealt...