Mark Madden: Plenty of scapegoats for the Penguins' 5-year collapse

The Penguins are already in deep trouble.

Not just because they’re 3-6-1 after losing four straight games in Western Canada. But because they look utterly impotent and disorganized, with the same old problems cropping up game after game: Blowing leads, conceding goals in quick succession, giving goals right back, allowing non-stop odd-man breaks, etc.

These are problems that bad teams have. The Penguins are a bad team.

The Penguins will regroup and have good runs occasionally. Bad teams do that, too. Management can’t be fooled by that. The Penguins are rotten, and should be administered accordingly.

In situations like this, everybody wants and needs somebody to blame. Jefferson Airplane should have written a song about it.

But this is organic. It’s an overnight collapse that’s five years in the making.

It happened in Chicago. The Blackhawks won Stanley Cups in 2010, ‘13 and ‘15. They’ve won one playoff series since and missed the playoffs in each of the last four seasons.

It happened in Los Angeles. The Kings won Stanley Cups in 2012 and ‘14 but haven’t won a playoff series since.

The only way the Penguins could have avoided what’s happening is if they had traded, say, Evgeni Malkin in 2018 or ‘19, got excellent return, then developed and augmented perfectly. Assembled youth, energy, hunger and quality around Sidney Crosby, who turned 31 in 2018.

That’s a big ask. With no guarantees.

Anyway, they didn’t.

The Penguins chose nostalgia, though they didn’t see it that way at the time.

The Penguins chose what the stars wanted, which is important to remember as things fall apart.

But if you want scapegoats, I got ‘em:

• The general managers. Jim Rutherford quit in mid-season of 2020-21. Worst time to replace a GM. Ron Hextall was lazy, agoraphobic and made bad decision after bad decision. Kyle Dubas is handcuffed, but the contracts given Tristan Jarry and Ryan Graves are on him.

• Erik Karlsson is a huge problem. I understood getting him because it supplemented the incumbent stars for one last run. They couldn’t say Dubas didn’t try. It also dumped a bunch of dead weight and salary cap.

But Karlsson flat-out stinks, and at an $11.5 million cap hit. It’s hard to believe he was ever good.

His production used to outweigh his mistakes. But he has a meh 62 points in 92 games as a Penguin and is a human hand grenade defensively. He’s got a team-high 18 giveaways. Daniel Sprong, the ex-Penguin who’s with his sixth team, blew around Karlsson at Vancouver Saturday like Karlsson wasn’t there.

I can’t read Karlsson’s mind. But it looks like he doesn’t care. I’m not surprised he’s never won. He told a reporter he’s playing “great.” So perhaps he’s deranged.

Kris Letang is struggling, too. But he’ll battle to play better. Karlsson thinks he’s playing “great.”

• The goaltending is awful, even when rookie Joel Blomqvist makes several good saves in a loss, like he did in Edmonton. (That’s a “bad team” problem, too.)

But Jarry really screwed the pooch, and the Penguins.

The Penguins should have ditched Jarry after he blew their 2021 playoff series against the New York Islanders. The contract he got in ‘23 — five years, $26.875 million — seems insane now. But there really aren’t many good goaltenders in today’s NHL, and Jarry was the devil the Penguins knew.

Jarry started this season horrifically. He was illogically sent home at the midway point of a four-game trip to Western Canada to work with the Penguins’ “director of goaltending,” whatever that is. Now he’s with the Penguins’ Wilkes-Barre/Scranton farm team on a conditioning assignment.

There are things we’re not being told. But those don’t matter. “Why” isn’t relevant.

Jarry is a stake through the heart of the Penguins, the single worst issue. His inconsistency is jarring. It looks like he’s in la-la land. If you’ve got eyes and a brain, he’s lost your trust.

Jarry should never play for the Penguins again. But he will.

• Mike Sullivan is a great coach.

But not for this group. He’s not “our Bill Belichick,” as Fenway Sports Group reportedly thinks.

He’s not Herb Brooks, either.

Brooks was best known for melding North American and European styles to produce the most shocking upset in sports history, the U.S. toppling the Soviet Union at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.

But Brooks didn’t always coach that way. Brooks evaluated his talent, then steered accordingly. If you gave him muckers and grinders, he’d turn mucking and grinding into an exercise in perfection.

Sullivan wants to play fast, as the Penguins have done in the past. But his players are slow.

The whole league plays fast. That’s the mantra. But the Penguins can’t. Half their team looks like it’s skating in quicksand. Not least up against a team like Edmonton. Friday night was an embarrassment.

The players want to play fast, especially the stars.

But hockey’s Bill Belichick ought to have the courage to be different. Not just acquiesce to the dressing room.

Would a Plan B work? We won’t ever find out.

There’s certainly more blame to go around. But space is limited and, as I write this, I’m starting to get focused on Liverpool FC vs. Arsenal.

But I don’t blame Crosby, Malkin and Letang.

Nor would I blame any of them for wanting to leave and pursue winning elsewhere. (Though Crosby is the only one who would find that option readily available.)

But keeping the core three together is what the core three wanted. Getting Karlsson by way of taking one last shot at glory was done at least partly to placate them. The dressing room mourned for weeks when Jake Guentzel got traded, and the resulting slump cost the Penguins a playoff spot.

It’s time for Fenway Sports Group and Dubas to look mercilessly at this franchise and do whatever’s needed to move in the proper direction.

Because this isn’t it.