The Chicago Black Hawks and Los Angeles Kings played an exciting regular season game that featured the two best teams of the decade. With five of the last six Stanley Cups, each franchise has put together a mini dynasty in the cap era.
Interestingly, that same night, the team that came into the decade as the franchise on the verge of a dynasty after winning a Stanley Cup in 2009, the Pittsburgh Penguins lost in overtime to the worst team in the league.
So what happened to the Pittsburgh Penguins?
They had the two best players in the world and never returned to the Final.
They have only escaped the first round of the playoffs a few times.
Everybody points to Davis Steckel’s hit to Sidney Crosby’s head as the biggest reason 
the Penguins have not even made a serious run in the post season. Crosby has come back though to win scoring titles and MVPs even if he’s rarely going into the dirty areas anymore. Sid seems a little skittish like a dog hiding under a table in a thunderstorm but until this year he put up points.
Evgeni Malkin, the other half of the two-headed monster, has had some injuries but he too has won scoring titles and an MVP since 2009. It’s easy to blame goaltending as most Penguins fans in Pittsburgh do. Other than his meltdown in the Flyer series, albeit the worst meltdown Pennsylvania has seen since the Three Mile Island disaster, goalie Marc-Andre Fleury has been one of the best netminders in the league.
Is it the curse of the new building?
No!! Hockey curses in Pittsburgh ended after Howard Baldwin’s gay pigeon logo was retired. Sadly, even the new, old, retro-logo hasn’t brought any playoff magic. The new rink is a palace. Sure the rats in the old Igloo used to intimidate some teams and now some fans are more concerned with the roast beef carving table than the game but how can four hundred consecutive sellouts and a nice locker room be bad?
The three biggest reasons the Penguins never became a dynasty are things that didn’t seem like anything major at the time but now seem catastrophic.
They are the violent debacle on Long Island, Kristopher Letang signing a huge contract and Dan Bylsma being named the 2014 American Olympic coach.
The Long Island Massacre changed the team’s identity and they haven’t got another one since.
In 2011, the Penguins humiliated the Islanders on the scoreboard and physically. Penguins backup goalie Brent Johnson knocked out Islander goalie Rick DiPeitro. The fact DiPietro could get hurt by a leaf falling on him did not deter Isles GM Garth Snow from vowing revenge.
The next game he called up players who couldn’t make that awful Islander team but could control the yard at Sing Sing.
Several line brawls ensued that night. The Pens’ roughnecks were all tossed out of the game early so by the end of the match many Penguin kids were getting the snot kicked out of them by the Islanders AHL thugs.
It was a scene reminiscent of the 70’s and the movie Slapshot not the 2010 player safety instruction videos.
Penguins’ owner and resident legend, Mario Lemieux, vowed to clean up his team and the league. Mario’s team was scrubbed clean but the league would retain a cheap hotel level of scum. The Penguins went from a team that was on top of the league in fighting majors to a team that doesn’t employ a goon.
The Pens don’t even know who should fight when they need too, like when Crosby gets crosschecked in the head. The only player who wants to do so is Geno Malkin but he leads the league in game-winning goals and shouldn’t hurt his hands on someone’s face shield.
Hey it’s okay to be pacifists, look at Detroit, they win. When your big three stars, Sid, Geno and Letang, are hot heads who can’t control their emotions you better have some knuckle draggers who can cash the checks the stars’ mouths write. Pittsburgh’s rivals know they can throw the Penguins off their game if the match gets the slightest bit chippy or become s playoff hockey.
Every time the Penguins try to out hit teams and not out score them they lose, usually in embarrassing fashion Even more embarrassing is that while the Pens were cleaning up their act, they employed the NHL Al Qaida poster boy of violence, Matt Cooke. Cooke never saw a head or knee shot he didn’t love or deliver. The Penguins rehabilitated the Cookie Monster, which made Cooke as useless as a porn star with erectile dysfunction. They also employed Brooks Orpik, a guy who would deliver bone crushing hits, some of which were illegal and never wanted to answer for them by fighting the victim or the victim’s teammates. Orpik didn’t believe he had to fight. Unfortunately, the league and some of his teammates did.  This only riled up opponents and gave them no leg to stand on when preaching to the Neanderthals at the league office. Patric Hornqvist did the same thing this season only to have Brandon Dubinsky use Sid Crosby’s neck as a Craftsmen work bench to break his stick with.
Penguin GMs, for the most part, have given their stars enough help. Other than Jim Rutherford deciding Daniel Winnik was more valuable than Jaromir Jagr or Ray Shero signing orange traffic cone Zybynek Michalek most of the bad decisions have been on the ice, and a lot of them have been made by Kris Letang.
The Penguins, Crosby’s listless season aside, have two great players and unfortunately they pay for three. In 2013, GM Ray Shero signed Kris Letang to a huge $58 million, seven-year contract. A contract befitting a great defenseman. He’s not a great defenseman.
Sorry Pierre Maguire I know you love his hair. He doesn’t even play good defense.
For the size of his contract, the Penguins could pay three defensemen to actually play defense. Letang is an offensive defenseman who can’t hit the net with his shot and doesn’t know how to run a power play.
When Letang was a rookie he was an exciting kid with upside. Four million dollar Letang was a guy who still made some rookie mistakes but had upside. Eight million dollar Letang is the most exciting defenseman in the league. Letang is a human odd man rush. He pinches in at all the wrong times and misses the net by twenty feet on his shots.
If the NHL didn’t count secondary assists Letang would have more points on his driver’s license than his hockey card.
Letang used to go first on the shootout, and then goalies caught on to his only move.
The answer is to trade Letang but you can’t, not in a salary cap league. Not when he’s oft-injured and just recently survived a stroke. The difference between Tanger and his contemporaries, Drew Doughty and PK Subban, is they actually score. Letang is not awful in his own end like Erik Karlsson but he doesn’t score. The only thing offensive about him is his bad penalties. Letang has never been the best defensemen on the team and sometimes he’s the worst. Letang is not a head case, he’s a hair case.
When USA Hockey named Dan Bylsma their coach for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi it became unpatriotic to fire Disco Dan, even though he overstayed his welcome in Pittsburgh. Yes, we’re grateful he took Mike Therrien’s team and won a Cup. Dan’s lack of coaching acumen was evident early on.
The fact Bylsma is now the Penguins’ winningest coach is more of an indictment of his playoff failures than his regular season success. Bylsma never liked to play rookies making the team stale because it was never infused with new young blood. Bylsma never believed in matching lines or as some call it, actually coaching.
Crosby always faced the toughest match up possible. Dan Bylsma never made an in-game adjustment other than maybe double shifting Sid or Geno or playing them together. He played Jarome Iginla on the third line. Bylsma, a marginal NHLer himself, loved third and fourth liners. He played them too much.
Hey Disco was a great guy, funny interview, a guy you want to have a beer with but he didn’t coach the Penguins; although he played the part magnificently on HBO 24/7. But put against BBQ Bruce Boudreau anyone can look like Scotty Bowman.
A coach tells Sid where he needs to be on the power play. He tells Letang not to pinch, up a goal with one minute left. He makes Geno feel important even when Sid is playing.
The summer Bylsma couldn’t be fired was the summer of 2013. The Philly playoff meltdown summer when heads needed to roll. Dan had to leave and two great coaches were available. Lindy Ruff and Peter Laviolette were unemployed.
Ruff coached the Buffalo Sabres for a generation and was a Brett Hull-skate away from bringing a championship to Buffalo.
Peter Laviolette did something even more impossible he made Mike Milbury look intelligent when he coached the Islanders. Laviolette won a Stanley Cup in North Carolina where they thought the Stanley Cup was a spittoon.
Now Lindy is atop the tough Central in Dallas where Peter was last year with the Nashville Predators.
The Penguins have Mike Johnston, a Don Barzini look alike, who will be whacked sooner than later. He’s so good at teaching defense he’s shutting down Sidney Crosby. Johnston may not be in over his head but it’s up to his neck.
There’s no more talk of dynasty in Pittsburgh. There probably never should have been.
Winning a Cup is hard, just ask the Flyers.
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