Ron Hextall's Master Plan for the Penguins
Yesterday's events revealed more of Ron Hextall's plan for the Pittsburgh Penguins this season.
Few people know Pittsburgh Penguins general manager Ron Hextall's plan for this team. As Rob Rossi of The Athletic noted on the Tip of the Ice-Burgh Podcast, not even Fenway Sports Group had seen his plan in its' entirety at one point.
However, his decisions this past week have lent us a clue as to what his approach has been this season for the Penguins, hope.
It started with the hope that the team's bottom six would over-perform despite devoting little attention to it during the off-season. He hoped a goaltending situation that failed them over the past two postseasons would miraculously fix itself. Neither of those two situations improved as the season continued.
Then came a new hope. Hope that a struggling Penguins team will turn things around without outside intervention or help. Despite losing 16 of 24 games since the Christmas break, Hextall did nothing to shake the roster up.
That hope must've run out after the Penguins 7-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers last week, forcing Hextall off the sidelines and into the mix, but even then, his moves to get into a position to acquire a difference maker were predicated on hope. He hoped that Kapseri Kapanen would get claimed off waivers (he did) and hoped that the same thing would happen with Brock McGinn or Mark Friedman (they didn't).
After taking hope out of the equation and trading away Teddy Blueger, the Penguins finally had enough cap space to make a move of significance. Unfortunately, the top prize, Jakob Chychrun, was already off the table.
Instead, Hextall acquired an aging defensively-challenged forward in Mikael Granlund, who is signed to an anchor of a contract for the next two seasons, likely closing the door on any other moves before Friday's deadline.
Hextall's management plan could be described as being too slow to react. But it's hard to deny that most of his plan was based on blind hope.
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