If you have to rebuild, just tell people you have to rebuild

11/19/2024 10:44 AM

Do not try to sugarcoat or pretend you are not.

At the bottom of his Monday "What I am hearing about the Penguins" article, The Athletic's Josh Yohe dropped this nugget that caught my attention.

• There is concern within the organization that fans won't respond favorably to a public admission of entering a rebuild. Personally, I think fans will respond well to it. These are smart hockey fans.

That brings me to two immediate reactions.

The first is that I agree with Josh that fans will probably respond well.

The second is that it is a rather misguided approach for the organization to take, and one that could actually end up burning them with the fans, resulting in the type of reaction they do not want — anger.

Based on everything they did from the trade deadline in 2024 through the start of the 2024-25 season, there is very little to indicate that this is business as usual for the Penguins. For the entirety of the Sidney Crosby-Evgeni Malkin-Kris Letang era the Penguins have always been a "do everything to win right now at all costs team." The future? You can worry about that in the future. There has never been a draft pick or prospect that was off the table to make the team better now, and you knew they were always going to spend to the upper limits of the league's salary cap.

While the team salary is still closer to the cap this season, there was a little more wiggle room than you are used to seeing at the start of the season.

But beyond that, nothing this team has done over the past six months suggests they were seriously trying to go for it and win this season. Everything has been with an eye toward the future, from trading Jake Guentzel, to taking on a bad contract to buy a future second-round pick, to signing a bunch of one-year stop-gap guys that looked like trade deadline fodder.

Now they already traded one of their top pending free agents (Lars Eller) and it is only a matter of when, and not if, players like Marcus Pettersson get the same treatment.

There will likely be others. It is just a matter of who.

It might not be a full-scale, scorched earth rebuild at this point, but it is very clearly the early stages of something at least close to that.

If it is, just tell the fans that. Do not hide it. Do not sugarcoat it. Do not pretend to be doing something else or having different motivations.

As an organization you have given this fan base nearly two decades of unrivaled success. Even including the past two non-playoff years, from the start of the 2005-06 season through the 2023-24 season the Penguins' 828 regular season wins are second only to the Boston Bruins (840). Their 103 playoff wins are the most in the NHL. Their four Stanley Cup Final appearances are tied for the most (Tampa Bay). Their three Stanley Cup championships are tied for the most (Chicago). Along with the on-ice results, you also had the correct mentality to always try to win right now, right up through the 2023-24 season.

As demanding and irrational as fans can be, the bulk of the fan base has always known that a different stage would be coming at some point as your core players get older. There would always be the need for some sort of a re-tooling or rebuilding.

They will be reasonable about it if you tell them. It might even becoming a rallying cry.

When the New York Rangers sent a letter to their fans back in February, 2018, telling them that they would be making changes and looking toward the future, it was widely accepted as a necessity. They supported it. They went along with it. They understood it.

I actually think there are quite a few lessons to take from that Rangers rebuild beyond the "be honest with fans" approach, but that is a different article for a different day.

When the Philadelphia 76ers went into full-scale tank mode, they had fans chanting "Trust The Process" at games. The rebuild actually becoming a rallying cry. People were on board with it. It might not have produced the championship results anybody wanted, but people were there for it.

If you keep trying to offer lip service to fans that you are trying to compete, and then your actual moves and plan is something different, all that is going to do is build resentment from the fan base. Not only because you are lying to them and most fans will see through that, but because you are setting an unrealistic expectation for what you are actually capable of. If you act like you are trying to win and then you fail to win, all that is going to do is make people think you are actually bad at your job. That turns up the pressure. That increases the anger and frustration. That creates the negative attention and backlash.

There should be some element of frustration from the fan base that the Penguins are at this point, because with better management and some better decisions over the past few years this could have been delayed another year or two. They could still be doing what the Washington Capitals are doing this season.

That ship, however, seems to have sailed. So this is the situation they have. Now that they are in it, they can not be afraid of admitting it.

If a rebuild is here. Just tell them.