Madden Monday: 'Unprofessional, inexcusable' moments that wrecked the Penguins' season

When the Pittsburgh Penguins cleaned out their lockers Thursday after another failed attempt to make the NHL playoffs, forward Lars Eller was asked where this season went wrong.

“I think we had some times during the season where we just got too low — emotionally and quality of play,” Eller said. “We were so far from our best.”

I asked the veteran center if he was specifically referring to the block of time around the trade of winger Jake Guentzel.

“That was a big part of that. Yeah, for sure,” Eller confirmed. “There were some games that I just didn’t really recognize our team. I was surprised at how far from our best we were in some of those games.”

In other words, the Penguins roster — despite being full of allegedly special veteran leadership — pouted like a group of little babies at a pivotal time in the season.

It sounds like general manager Kyle Dubas agrees with Eller’s assessment. On Friday, I asked him if he was surprised at and disappointed in the team’s reaction to the Guentzel trade.

“Both,” Dubas replied. “Surprised and disappointed (in) that. The reason is that we showed (what) we’re capable of once we got back to it — for the last 12 or 13 games.”

That’s an understandable response. After all, from Feb. 29 through March 24, roughly the month of time in which the speculation of a Guentzel trade began to ramp up, and the subsequent few weeks after his exit, the Penguins won just three games in 14 tries. Then the team finished on a hot streak, winning eight of its last 12 from March 26 until the end of the season.

At that point, though, it was too late.

In this week’s “Madden Monday” podcast, Mark Madden of 105.9 The X and TribLive shredded the Penguins for their emotional funk related to the Guentzel trade.

“That is where the season went to crap,” Madden said. “They were mourning the loss of Jake Guentzel. That’s unprofessional. It’s inexcusable. More than anything, it wrecked their season.”

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Madden says the club’s fragile resolve at the beginning of March indicates a larger problem.

“This team has become, in the locker room, too much of a get-along gang,” Madden continued. “When the Penguins were winning (Stanley) Cups back in the early ’90s, in ‘91, they traded John Cullen (to Hartford), who was the most popular guy in the locker room. In ‘92, they traded (Mark) Recchi and (Paul) Coffey (to Philadelphia), two future Hall of Famers. And somehow they managed to not cry and managed to win.”

Madden also wasn’t thrilled with how the organization handled a road trip out to Las Vegas for a game on Jan. 20.

“They went out four days early to party, and blew a 2-0 lead in the third period at Vegas (losing 3-2). Then they had that awful loss to Arizona (5-2), and subsequently lost the home game (3-2 to the Florida Panthers) when they got back. Why did they need to go to Vegas four days early? That’s an itinerary that would have killed Nicolas Cage.”

If you don’t get the reference, watch “Leaving Las Vegas” on the streaming platform of your choice.

Why not? What else are you going to do? Watch the NHL playoffs without the Penguins in them for the second straight year?

Also, in this week’s “Madden Monday” podcast, Madden and I discuss the future of Tristan Jarry, the Steelers draft, the slumping Pirates and the TV show “Manhunt.”