Pittsburgh Penguins: Mike Sullivan vs. Dan Bylsma

By Kayleigh Jackson |

Pittsburgh Penguins coach Mike Sullivan has turned his team around after being hired mid-season. The last time this happened, the Pens won the Cup.

In the 2008-2009 season, Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Michel Therrien was fired after a poor start to the year and a bad attitude in the room. Dan Bylsma was brought on as his replacement, and the Penguins won the Stanley Cup.

In the 2015-2016 season, Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Mike Johnston was fired after a poor start to the year and a bad attitude in the room. Mike Sullivan was brought on as his replacement, and…

See where I’m going here?

Now, of course it’s too early to say with certainty that the Pens will even make it to the Final, let alone win it. And this reasoning alone is far too little to predict it. New coaches come in across the league every year and they rarely take a team that far in their first year.

But there’s a lot of deja vu in the scenario that we’re in now.

When the Pens won in 2009, it was after a coaching shakeup. Therrien and captain/franchise star Sidney Crosby famously clashed with one another, and the Pens’ play was poor enough to remove him from his position.

Bylsma, who was coach of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins at the time, was promoted to the role of interim head coach in Pittsburgh in February. By April, he was named official head coach, and by June, his team was the Stanley Cup champion.

After his hiring, the Penguins flourished, going 18–3–4 in their first 25 games and becoming the team to beat. Though he had some NHL coaching experience as an assistant coach to the New York Islanders, this was his first opportunity at the helm of an NHL team.

Hmmm, that sounds familiar.

Sullivan was named head coach in December of 2015, after Mike Johnston was fired following a dismal start to the season. Johnston was an ineffective coach personality-wise, failing to really inspire his team. Though he never truly lost the room to the degree Therrien (or later, Bylsma) did, his time was clearly up.

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Sullivan had assistant coaching experience with the Tampa Bay Lightning, Vancouver Canucks, and New York Rangers; at the time Pittsburgh hired him as head coach, he was the head coach of the WBS Penguins – who were having a phenomenal season.

His start was a little rocky, but the Penguins quickly began to pick up steam and become the hottest team in the league. They got faster, more exciting, grittier, flashier, smarter, and more aggressive, all at once.

The team that no one believed would make the playoffs are in the playoffs, and are doing darn well.

Now, I did mention that Bylsma ended up losing the locker room – and boy, did he ever lose it. However, that didn’t take place for years after his hiring and subsequent Cup win, and by that point the players were just not enjoying the game or felt like the coaching staff was effective.

I don’t see any danger of that happening any time soon now. The players are having fun playing and the atmosphere in the room seems to be fun and cohesive. Sullivan inspires his players and does what’s best for them, health-wise and career-wise, all while intimidating the referees and expertly manipulating the media.

The team we have now may be even better than that 2009 championship team. The all-stars are absolutely on fire, as we saw from Evgeni Malkin scoring two goals last night – they have more playoff experience now than they did then, plus their window is probably starting to close.

At some level, whether they want to admit it or not, the core players (Malkin, Crosby, Kris Letang, and Marc-Andre Fleury) are all in their primes, closer to their decline than advent. Winning another Cup isn’t exactly “now or never,” but there’s a little bit of a time crunch.

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The Penguins have to make it through the strongest Washington Capitals team the league’s ever seen to make it there, too. Assuming we make it through the first round and so do the Caps, neither side will have an easy go of it over the next few weeks.

Not only will the teams throw constant bone-crunching hits, but each side also has a do or die mentality and spectacular stars leading the team.

But I think we can do it. The credit for that in no small part goes to Sullivan and what he’s done with this team. From the top down, the Pens are in sync and productive – a tough team to play against in Pittsburgh, but even more difficult to face on the road.

Tomorrow afternoon, the series returns to Pittsburgh for game five. The Rangers will surely be looking to rebound in an elimination game from their rough outing last night, but the Pens might just be too hot.

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