Tim Benz: Kyle Dubas' '2-pronged' goal for Penguins sounds familiar, but we know which 'prong' really matters
Former Penguins executives Ron Hextall and Brian Burke are two of the easiest punching bags in the history of Pittsburgh sports.
They were both widely disliked by the fanbase before they got hired by the organization for things they did against — or said
Then, when they got here as general manager and president of hockey ops, respectively, things didn’t go particularly well. The Penguins failed to win a playoff series in 2021 and ’22 and actually regressed to the point of missing the postseason entirely for the first time since ’06 this spring.
It’s not exactly like Vontaze Burfict and Bill Belichick becoming the coach and GM of the Steelers, then flaming out after two or three years. But it was pretty close to the on-ice version of that.
However, Hextall and Burke were tasked with an impossible job: Win now and build for the future at the same time. They proved inept at doing either.
It’s not like holdover head coach Mike Sullivan helped by stubbornly sticking with familiar systems that stopped working in 2018 while refusing to put trust in some new acquisitions and young call-ups.
Nor did the players themselves aid the cause as goaltending wobbled every spring and star players often failed to produce in April and May.
By the time Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang came up for free agency last summer, it became clear that all chips were being pushed into the center of the table on the first of those two tasks for Hextall and Burke: keep everybody together and win now.
More sports
• First Call: Longtime member of Steelers franchise retires; Penguins on fringes of potential goalie trade derby
• Savvy vets Elandon Roberts, Cole Holcomb already forging close bond as Steelers’ new ILB duo
• Steelers sign RB Darius Hagans, OL Jarrid Williams
Not just keeping Letang and Malkin with Sidney Crosby last summer. But Rickard Rakell, Bryan Rust and Casey DeSmith were pulled back from free agency with new contracts. Jeff Carter was mysteriously never allowed to get there. And vets such as Jason Zucker, Jeff Petry, Tristan Jarry, Jan Rutta, Brian Dumoulin and Mikael Granlund were either added or retained to play through the final year of their deals without being moved for future assets.
So all those chips just disappeared as the team failed to qualify for postseason play for the first time in 16 years.
However, the newly crowned president of hockey operations, Kyle Dubas, is being tasked with the same push-pull mission: Win now while restoring the pipeline for the future.
And he is actually talking like he thinks he can make it work.
“I see this task ahead of us as a two-pronged effort,” Dubas said at his introductory press conference. “In the short run, it’s continuing to make decisions that are going to allow the team to be competitive, while the core group of players that have led the team here to championships in the past continue to perform at the levels that they have for as long as they can and make decisions that will support them in the lineup every night. That will allow the team to continue to contend each season while those players are with us at the same time.”
As for the long run?
“The work will also begin at delivering a long-term hockey organization that can be the class of the NHL and to reduce any gap in time that there otherwise would be from the end of those great players’ careers to the next era of great hockey for the Pittsburgh Penguins. That’s our intention,” Dubas explained.
Well, my guess is that the emphasis will be a lot more on the former rather than the latter. As badly as the 2022-23 season ended for the Penguins, there have been 18 years of energy dedicated to building around the Penguins in the Crosby era. That object is in motion, and it is going to stay in motion so long as Crosby is here.
And so long as Sullivan is coaching. Since Dubas is already on
After failing to get a contract extension as the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Dubas has to be much more interested in the “win now” part of that equation as well. He knows he wasn’t brought to Pittsburgh to prioritize creating a soft cushion for the franchise to land once 87, 71 and 58 are gone. Dubas isn’t thinking to himself right now, “Gee, who can I put on Jake Guentzel’s line at the end of his next contract if we keep him until 2029?”
Dubas wants to manufacture a way to make another deep run with the Penguins with those pieces currently in place. It’s the fastest way to success. Frankly, he doesn’t have a choice. Many of those players have limited or full no-movement clauses.
If it doesn’t work, oh well. Dubas and whoever the next GM is will get blown out just like Hextall and Burke, and it’ll be up to the next two guys to work on the second half of the mission statement. Because at that point, there won’t be any other option aside from building for the future, even if a lot more deconstruction remains.
At least Dubas appears to be coming into his position with a lot more benefit-of-the-doubt points than either Hextall or Burke got from the fanbase or the media.
As if either got any — or deserved any — in the first place.
In the latest podcast, Brian Metzer joins Tim Benz to discuss the Penguins’ hiring Kyle Dubas as the president of hockey operations. They also discuss Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final between the Vegas Golden Knights and Florida Panthers.
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.