The trade
get penguins: Striker Mikael Granlund
Get Predators: Second round election 2023
Sean Gentille: The “slammed window” analogy will be popular in Pittsburgh tonight, and it’s understandable. Falling behind in the Eastern Conference arms race and then trying to fix the mismanagement of the two-year cap in three days, only to add a player as consistently ineffective and uneconomical as Granlund is bound to freak some people out. It should.
See, Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin are only going to get so many bites on the apple. The chances of them being as good and as healthy as they have been this season are… slim. Also, years of striving under Jim Rutherford and overpaying supporting actors under Ron Hextall have squeezed margins. Yet even after last week’s trade-a-palooza, it appeared the penguins still had a path to relevance in the East.
They were in Jakob Chychrun. He wouldn’t have solved their bottom six problem, but he would have given them a second legitimate No. 1 defender to pair with Kris Letang. And Chychrun is 24. Adding one of the Canucks’ big forwards — JT Miller or Brock Boeser — would have been less helpful. They are good but overpaid. A little harder to sell than Chychrun, but win-now teams have tough decisions to make.
And if that failed, hey, they were at least out of Kasperi Kapanen’s contract for next season. Sitting out a season as a buyer — as ridiculous as it seemed and antithetical to the organization’s 2005-2021 approach — could at least have been sellable.
Instead, they locked themselves into a player that seems designed in a lab to solve literally none of their problems. Granlund is 31. He is short. His point production is bad. Its effects at 5v5 are worse. He makes $5 million. He makes that amount for two seasons after this one.
Poof goes to the top this season. Phew, flexibility is next. Now, as always, Hextall’s penguins are locked in a payroll with irreplaceable stones at the top, immovable stones in the middle, and irrelevant stones at the bottom. They are worse today than they were yesterday, and they will probably be worse tomorrow. That’s it. Maybe the window slammed. Maybe it’s soft closed.
Or maybe we should move to another analogy: the boiling frog.
penguins: f
predators: A+
Dom Luszczyszyn: It’s never good when the trending topic on Twitter is #FireTeamGM immediately after a trade, but Penguins fans have every right to be upset about Hextall’s latest deal.
As the rest of the Eastern Conference tries to outdo each other in an epic arms race, the Penguins responded with a Nerf gun. A super sucker. A slingshot. Nothing that’ll really matter when it comes time to face one of the real beasts of the east, a fight the penguins were unequipped for before the trade and are ill-equipped for afterwards.
Granlund used to be a fantastic player and it’s possible he can deliver in a lesser role as the team’s third-line centre. Possible, but not very likely. His recent results have been so pathetic that it’s amazing he was the target.
In five-a-side, Granlund has scored 1.33 points per 60 this year. That’s bad enough, but it’s not like that’s a massive departure from his score over the past few years: 1.57, 1.58, 1.38. For the past three years he has ranked 256th among forwards between Kyle Palmieri and Sammy Blais. Not great company.
Unfortunately, that’s not the worst. There’s the other problem that the Predators scored just 45 percent of expected and actual goals this year with Granlund on the ice in five-a-side. Both are among the team’s lowest marks, despite spending most of his minutes with Filip Forsberg, Matt Duchene and Nino Niederreiter. All three have done much better without him. Granlund’s problems lie primarily on defense, where the Predators concede 3.28 expected goals per 60 with him on the ice, 0.44 worse than teammates and one of the lowest marks in the entire league. Offensively, the team with Granlund is 0.49 fewer goals per 60 on the ice. He was a wreck at both ends.
Unfortunately, that’s not the worst either.
Worst of all, this isn’t a one-year blunder: it’s one that will continue for two more seasons after that. Granlund, 31, is likely to only get worse from here. That the Predators were somehow able to snag a second for a deeply negative asset is an absolute coup, a master class from David Poile’s farewell tour. This is nothing but an absolute win for them.
For the Penguins, spending what little space they have in their roster on an old and inefficient player is an absolutely bewildering decision. it’s not just a loss. It’s not just a bad grade. It could be the final nail in the coffin in the last chance Pittsburgh had to make a run in the Crosby, Malkin, Letang era.
penguins: D
predators: A+
(Photo: Joe Sargent/NHLI via Getty Images)