Penguins Update: Building Through the Draft Doesn’t Guarantee Success
If you’re a Penguins fan, you know the inevitable looms just ahead and around the corner. Eventually, the Pens are going to tear down the last vestiges of their Stanley Cup champions and begin a rebuild in earnest.
The once-mighty Red Wings succumbed to the forces of Father Time. So have the equally proud Blackhawks. Like our Pens, three-time Cup winners in the new millennium.
The plan in a nutshell? A reverse-Rutherford, if you will. Trade off any remaining veteran talent for draft capital, in the process hopefully snagging some lottery picks and if you’re real lucky, a budding franchise player (see McKenna, Gavin).
It’s a dynamic that’s played out twice before in our storied history. In the early 1980s, then-GM Eddie Johnston boldly tore a fading veteran team that in some ways reminds me of this one down to the floorboards in order to draft franchise savior Mario Lemieux.
Twenty years later, Craig Patrick and chief scout Greg Malone did yeoman’s work after executing a similar sell-off. In relatively short order they drafted Colby Armstrong, Marc-André Fleury, Alex Goligoski, Tyler Kennedy, Kris Letang, Ryan Malone, Brooks Orpik, Rob Scuderi and Max Talbot, along with a couple of guys named Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.