Tim Benz: Penguins GM Ron Hextall seems to want to keep the band together. I'm still hoping for a few new tunes

Based on what Pittsburgh Penguins general manager Ron Hextall said Monday, not only does he want to keep the whole band together, he wants to re-release a greatest hits album.

As I listened to Hextall’s comments from his press conference, my mind started to picture Sidney Crosby, Kris Letang, Evgeni Malkin and Bryan Rust in Kiss face paint. Because that’s the only group that I can think of that’s had as many goodbye tours as this foursome in Pittsburgh has had.

In each of the past four years, the Penguins have come up short in the first round of the playoffs. And every year management sees reason to bring everybody back to give it “one more go” at trying to bring a sixth Stanley Cup to Pittsburgh.

Part of that thinking has always been that Rust, Malkin and Letang were all under contract. So why not at least see those deals through until they expire?

Understandable.

Now, here we are at the end of those agreements. Yet, so far in the offseason, Hextall is giving the impression that he thinks the fifth time must be the charm.

As of Saturday, the dust still hadn’t even settled on the Pens’ first-round playoff exit to the New York Rangers, but that’s when Hextall decided to give Rust a six-year contract worth $30.75 million.

By Monday, Hextall was talking big about keeping Letang and Malkin in Pittsburgh as well.

“We have had discussions very recently and will continue to have those discussions. We would like to sign both players,” Hextall said. “They’ve both been here 16 years. (Malkin) has obviously been a great player. Certainly one of the best players in the history of the game. We’d like to keep him as a Pittsburgh Penguin for the rest of his career. In a perfect world, he retires as a Penguin. Letang is the same. He’s been here the same amount of time. These two are generational players. They don’t come around very often. We’d like to keep them here through the rest of their careers. … We will continue to work with both guys and hopefully come to agreements with them at some point.”

Last year, Malkin was a $9.5 million salary-cap hit. Letang was at $7.25 million. Both will need to take hometown discounts of some degree to stay. Malkin’s will have to be well down from last year’s number. Letang may well get a healthier contract offer for extended years from some other team. If he wants to stay, he can’t expect the Penguins to match it.

But even if both of those deals can be struck, is it worth it? As great as those two players are, they aren’t what they were 16 years ago when this run with Crosby started. Nor are they even close to what they were when the team had its resurgence in 2016 and 2017 en route to Stanley Cups Nos. 4 and 5 for the franchise.

Malkin is a shadow of what he once was five-on-five. And for all the magnificent skating, offensive acumen, ice coverage and minutes-eating from Letang, he was on the ice for 17 of the 28 goals scored by the Rangers during the playoff series loss. A theme that wasn’t restricted to this past spring when it comes to recent playoff exits.

Yet Hextall seems to have placed more value in how the Penguins got into the playoffs and how they began that series up 3-1, as opposed to how the series ended. Mainly because of injury-related absences within the series endured by Crosby, Tristan Jarry, Casey DeSmith, Brian Dumoulin and Rickard Rakell.

“We felt like we were in that series. There were some circumstances that dictated we didn’t come out on the winning end of it, unfortunately. But we felt like we were in it, and we had a good enough team where we could’ve gone on a run,” Hextall insisted.

The previous three first-round playoff exits against the Montreal Canadiens and New York Islanders (twice) always seemed to end with Penguins players, coaches and team officials advancing similar “yeah, but” arguments about why they lost.

But they lost. Five series in a row now. That’s after head coach Mike Sullivan had won his first nine in Pittsburgh.

Something with the Penguins is broken come playoff time. And the organization can’t always fall back on blaming injuries, the officials, bad goaltending, good goaltending in the other net, a pandemic bubble, bad luck or anything else you can highlight.

If ever there was a year to change the makeup of this team and reconfigure it around Crosby, this is it.

Expiring contracts. New ownership. Some new faces in management.

Instead of trying to figure out how much more blood can be squeezed out of the stone with the current roster, why not play with the $32.7 million in cap space in UFA and RFA contracts that could come off the books after the season ended? How would that play in the trade and free-agent markets? What a nice change that would be for the Penguins. A luxury they haven’t had in years.

Even after keeping Rust, Cap Friendly projects the Penguins’ total to be at roughly $23.9 million in space. And Rust’s signing makes sense. He’s only 30. He can play on any of the top three lines. Plus, if you lose a top two-line winger like him, you’ll probably have to pay at least the equivalent of his $5.1 million salary to adequately replace him anyway.

But keeping Malkin and Letang would eat up more than half that space. And then Hextall would likely be patching the holes on the roster that exist with this year’s versions of Brandon Tanev, Danton Heinen, Brock McGinn and Mark Jankowski.

We’ve got to keep in mind that Hextall is just talking right now, at least when it comes to Letang and Malkin. He may just be saying things that he feels are expeditious. His actions were swift, though, when it came to Rust. And he sure seemed sincere in his desire to retain Malkin and Letang.

Yeah. It feels like the band is lining up a familiar setlist at next year’s concert, doesn’t it?

Play Free Bird!