Mike Sullivan gets philosophical on Penguins power play — now he needs to get it working
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When it comes to his team’s confounding power play, you can hear Pittsburgh Penguins coach Mike Sullivan struggling with the contradictions.
He wants it to be more “predictable,” but he doesn’t want it “robotic.”
He wants his skilled players to be creative, but he also wants the execution to be simplified.
He wants to see some things change, but he doesn’t want to walk away from the players that have made it work in the past.
Most of all, though, it just wants to see it improve. The Penguins man-up unit is in a 3 for 38 funk and is 23rd in the league at 20.3%.
“There was a long stretch of hockey where they were one of the top power-play units in the league,” Sullivan said during his weekly Tuesday night coach’s show on 105.9 The X. “There is a narrative that suggests, split them all up, and use different people. But in my tenure here as the coach in Pittsburgh, this group of players on our power play has been one of the top units in the league for a fair amount of time. They are very capable guys. The challenge is to help them find solutions. The challenge is to get them to work in sync so that they can be at their best.”
To a large degree, the numbers back up Sullivan’s claim. Since the start of the 2015-16 season (Sullivan took over as the franchise’s coach in December 2015), the Penguins have the fifth-best power play in hockey at 22.1%. At one point this season, the power play scored in 10 straight games, lighting the lamp 14 times during the club’s 8-1-1 hot streak in mid-December.
“It’s been a little bit of a rollercoaster ride with our power play this year,” Sullivan admitted to host Josh Getzoff. “For I don’t know how many weeks, we were a top-five power play in the league. So it’s hard for me to walk away from that and say, ‘Hey, this can’t work.’ This should work.”
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One problem has been player availability, especially when it comes to which defensemen are healthy. Because of a stroke and then an absence due to the death of his father, Kris Letang hasn’t played since Dec. 28. Jeff Petry has been injured since Dec. 10. Ty Smith and Pierre-Olivier Joseph are still young and green when it comes to running an NHL power play. And that role isn’t easily filled by Brian Dumoulin or Marcus Pettersson.
Another challenge for Sullivan has been trying to build some elements of structure to the power play without squeezing naturally gifted players such as Letang, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Jake Guentzel in coaching vice grips.
“You can over-coach it, and the players become robotic. You take them out of their instinctive mindset when players are at their best,” Sullivan said. “We have some first-ballot Hall of Famers on that unit that think the game at a really high level. So, we don’t want to get in the way of that. But we have to have some predictability among the group of five. That’s what we are trying to do. Get them on the same page. Simplify the game. Get in more of a shooting mindset. Usually, their instincts take over from there.”
Sullivan better hope so. Because there really isn’t an answer on the bench, in the AHL or in a trade (unless a current big-salary-cap-ticket player is shipped out).
Sullivan is accurate when he says that he’s had a good power play at times in Pittsburgh. But what he doesn’t have now is Phil Kessell on the left wall. Or Patric Hornqvist causing havoc in front of the net. Or depth players on the blueline with offensive touch like Justin Schultz and Trevor Daley.
In the absence of boundless options on the ice, it’s now up to him and his staff to coach up what he’s got.
“It’s one of the great challenges of coaching,” Sullivan told Getzoff. “To a certain extent, that’s the art of coaching versus the science of coaching.”
Well, it’s time to decide between art and science. The Pens are beyond the halfway point of their season. Through 43 games, the Penguins have 22 wins and 21 losses (22-15-6). That’s good for 50 points, currently tied with the New York Islanders for the last playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
So whether Sullivan wants to use a paintbrush to express his art or a microscope to apply some science, he better figure out something with this power play quickly. Because, after its recent stretch of ineptitude, a blow torch or a sledgehammer is beginning to look like a more appropriate tool.