At last, it’s the postseason
major role.
Either would be as good an explanation as any for a season in which, among other oddities, the:
• Best set-up man in the game, Sidney Crosby, didn’t lead his team in assists, but instead scored more goals than anyone in the NHL.
• Line that became all but legendary in the 2016 playoffs — remember HBK? — didn’t come close to making it through this season intact.
• Guy who did lead the team in assists, Phil Kessel, is a reliable goal-scorer who found the net precisely two times in the final 26 games of the regular season.
Few were predicting any of that six or seven months ago.
Sullivan and his staff, though, understood hurdles would appear over the course of the season, even if they couldn’t anticipate precisely what all of them would be. Consequently, they had brainstorming sessions to consider the possibilities.
“In the big picture, some of the conversation revolved around trying to predict potential upcoming challenges, coming off a Stanley Cup championship and how we’d handle those,” Sullivan said. “There were some that we could predict, and then there were others that were unforeseen.”
“It’s been a weird year,” winger Conor Sheary said. “But we’re in a good spot.”
True enough. Despite the obstacles — and weirdness — the Penguins faced during the regular season, they finished with the secondmost points [111] in the league and in franchise history.
It wasn’t enough to earn a division title — Washington, the only team to finish with more points, also works in the Metropolitan Division — but did give the Penguins home-ice advantage in their opening-round playoff series against Columbus.
That’s an edge they had during Round 1 in two of their previous three title defenses.
The exception was 1992, when they were coming off a regular season that made the one just completed seem tranquil and orderly.
The 1991-92 season began with tragedy — shortly before the start of training camp, coach Bob Johnson was diagnosed with the brain tumors that would claim his life a few months later — and was pockmarked by turmoil.
“When you start rattling off what we went through in ’91-92, those were bizarre circumstances,” said radio analyst Phil Bourque, a left winger on that club.
The Penguins stumbled to a 5-6-3 start under Scott Bowman, who succeeded Johnson as coach, and dramatically altered their roster in a three-team trade Feb. 19. General manager Craig Patrick sent away two key members of the 1991 Cup champions, Mark Recchi and Paul Coffey, and brought in Rick Tocchet, Kjell Samuelsson, Ken Wregget and Jeff Chychrun.
That deal came during a 2-10-3 slide that precipitated the event that transformed their season.
Bowman, whose approach to interpersonal relationships with his personnel was not to be confused with Johnson’s, was away visiting his family in Buffalo, when Patrick and the players gathered in a Calgary hotel ballroom in early March to discuss why a talented team that won a championship the previous spring was in mortal peril of missing the playoffs.
The focus fell on Bowman, and Patrick, after absorbing his players’ grievances, agreed to go to Bowman to try to find a common ground that would satisfy everyone. The Penguins subsequently beat the Flames, 6-3, triggering an 115-1 run to end the season. A few months later — after surviving a 3-1 deficit against Washington in Round 1 — they claimed their second Cup.
“The crossroads of our season were in that meeting room in the hotel in Calgary,” Bourque said.
“It was such a cleansing moment for the players.”
Although the 2016-17 Penguins haven’t had to deal with that kind of personal drama, Bourque believes they could benefit from the challenges they’ve faced.
“This could all be good for this team,” he said.
“All the hurdles we had to get over in ’92, I think, made us stronger, made us more battle-tested.”
So, peculiar as it has been at times, 2016-17 won’t go down as the Penguins’ most unusual season that followed a Cup championship.
They can only hope that it has the same ending.