Pittsburgh Penguins May Have Changed the NHL
The Pittsburgh Penguins won their fourth Stanley Cup Sunday with a 3-1 victory over the San Jose Sharks. The way they did it, however, may have changed the way NHL teams will construct themselves in the future.
The 2015-16 Pittsburgh Penguins may not look like your typical NHL Champion. They aren’t the biggest team and they aren’t the toughest team. None of that mattered though, because the Penguins were the fastest and probably the most skilled team in the playoffs, and that is how they won the Stanley Cup.
Before the Stanley Cup Final began, I thought San Jose had the size advantage and enough speed to give the Pens fits. That certainly wasn’t the case. The Penguins were noticeably faster and vastly outplayed the Sharks in at least five of the six games in the Championship series.
Size hardly seemed to play a role. The Sharks at times looked like they were stuck in the mud. The Penguins won races to the puck, kept possession in their offensive zone, and harassed the Sharks with blocked shots and a relentless forecheck.
The results were outstanding. The Penguins out-possessed the Sharks, drastically so much of the time. They also out-shot them, and prevented any San Jose counterattack.
A perfect example is the third period of game six. With the Sharks entire season and Stanley Cup on the line, San Jose could only muster two shots on goal. Truly an incredible defensive effort by the entire Penguins team.
This wasn’t just something we saw in the Finals. Similar results occurred in the series against the New York Rangers and Washington Captials. Teams that tried to slow the Penguins down by hitting them found themselves left in the dust.
Despite all of their success however, the Penguins are not your stereotypical pro hockey team. Critics have long called the Penguins “soft”. Their defensemen are not the big, bruising guys one would expect. In fact, they made moves to ensure their team wouldn’t look that way.
They traded Rob Scuderi, a more typical, hitting defenseman, for Trevor Daley, a fast, sure-handed blue liner. To improve their third line, they didn’t go after a checking forward. Instead, they plugged in the speedy sniper Phil Kessel.
Another benefit of the Pens new system was that they could acquire the pieces needed for this team without upsetting their tough salary cap situation. Players like Kessel, Daley, and Justin Schultz were viewed as expendable, or even flawed, by their previous teams, enabling the Penguins to pick them up for lower picks or with some of their salary retained.
It also meant their young talent, such as Bryan Rust, Conor Sheary, and Tom Kuhnhackl, could utilize their speed and not be neutralized by a hard checking team. The Penguins turned NHL logic on its head. They felt that if you can’t out-hit your opponents, skate circles around them. And the results, as you can see, speak for themselves.
The question becomes, have the Penguins shown enough to change the NHL style of play? It may seem like a stretch, but the NHL goes through cycles. There are physical, slow eras, like the New Jersey Devils’ neutral zone trap, and eras of speed and skill.
The Penguins success this season could be the break point between cycles. The way Pittsburgh dominated play in the Stanley Cup should have teams taking notice. It should be noted that the Penguins are not the only speedy, possession based team in the NHL. The Tampa Bay Lightning and Dallas Stars also have these traits, and both are very successful.
Now that a team has won a championship with this formula, I expect others in the NHL to invest in fast, possession-dominant skaters. Even Penguins owner and hockey great Mario Lemieux was quoted as saying “I think you’ll see a lot of teams changing the way they play.”
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If and when other teams adopt the Penguins up-tempo style, it will make it harder for the Penguins to acquire those kinds of players and may make it harder to orchestrate deep playoff runs.
That being said, the era of the goon, of the slow physical skater, may be at an end, at least for the time being. The future should hold a fast, exciting, higher scoring version of the game, and for that you can thank the Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins.