Tim Benz: Don't confuse future success for Mike Sullivan with the current state of the Penguins

Congratulations in advance to Mike Sullivan for winning a Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers.

I mean, I don’t know that such a thing will ever happen — especially in Year 1 of his tenure at Madison Square Garden.

But I just want to get out ahead and preemptively congratulate him on the accomplishment in case it does.

Because if that event does occur, and Sullivan is the guy who brings the Rangers their first NHL title since 1994 and just their second since the end of World War II, it still doesn’t mean that moving on from him was the wrong choice for the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Everything that has happened since he departed has underscored that belief.

• The Penguins have kept two teenagers on their roster in Ben Kindel and Harrison Brunicke.

• The franchise did next to nothing externally through free agency or the trade market to bolster this year’s team.

• President of hockey operations Kyle Dubas used all three of his first-round picks instead of packaging them for any help this year.

• Sidney Crosby’s agent started priming the pump about his client potentially wanting to leave town if the team wasn’t in a competitive situation before the trade deadline.

• Sullivan’s own replacement, Dan Muse, seems to be of a mind to play more structured and systematic hockey. Given the roster assembled, that appears to be more of Dubas’ liking.

• The only NHL goalie acquired to be an option to Tristan Jarry following the departure of Alex Nedeljkovic is Artūrs Šilovs.

How in the world do you think Sullivan would’ve handled all of that?!

Let me rephrase: How in the world do you think Sullivan would’ve handled any of that?

For as much as the Penguins are leaning into the living nostalgia element of having Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang still here from a marketing standpoint, bobblehead nights and Stanley Cup anniversary celebrations only go so far.

That’s the exterior paint. The inside of the house is undergoing major renovations, and I’m pretty sure ol’ Sully would’ve been driven crazy by the construction delays and mistakes made by the contractors.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Sullivan never would’ve had the patience for this. Dubas and the rest of the front office have steered into exactly what they planned on doing:

Get the club younger. Create financial flexibility. Construct a roster that might be really good in a few years, instead of one that’s going to be perpetually mediocre for the foreseeable future.

Sullivan’s head would’ve exploded by Halloween if he had stayed. He wanted the puncher’s chance at a playoff berth. Dubas wanted an entire organizational rebirth.

Dubas is not there yet (in part because of some of his own missteps), but he’s getting there.

I keep going back to Dubas’ words in late April when the team announced Sullivan would be leaving.

“He and I met (April 22) about where we’re at, where we’re going — the road that we see to get there, the challenges that lie ahead,” Dubas said. “I left there — and there have been a few times during the year where I felt this as well after certain stretches, or after certain games — where I started to feel that maybe it was just time.

“Someone can be a great coach, and it might be time for them to go elsewhere and reapply that. … Sometimes the class needs a new professor, and sometimes the professor needs a new class.”

As for Prof. Sully, maybe he can turn around a team with plenty of veteran pupils that underachieved last year.

Sound familiar? Let him do that again in New York — to whatever degree he possibly can.

OK, maybe not two Cups as he did in Pittsburgh.

Be happy for him — to whatever degree you possibly can, given that these are the Rangers we’re talking about.

And let the Penguins be who they need to be this year so they can (to use a Sullyism) “move forward.”

Because as often as Sullivan used to spin that phrase, it was no longer possible for that to happen here under him.

LISTEN: Tim Benz posts his first hockey podcast of the regular season with Pens Radio Network host Brian Metzer.