Tim Benz: Penguins must parlay surprising regular season into extended playoff run

The 2021 Pittsburgh Penguins have significantly exceeded expectations. A lot of people — both inside of Pittsburgh and beyond — saw this season as a potential fallback year for the Pens.

In a best-case scenario, many thought they’d claw their way into the playoffs as the fourth team from a crowded East Division. In a worst-case scenario, their consecutive run of playoff seasons would stop before it hit 15.

I was in that first camp, more or less picking the Penguins to make the playoffs out of habit. And because I needed to see them miss before I was willing to believe that could happen.

While I was barely optimistic enough to believe they’d make the postseason, you never could’ve convinced me that they would be champions of this thick East Division. Nor would you have been able to get me to buy into that theory if you had told me in advance how bad their injury situation was going to be.

Again.

We are used to those annual log jams on the NHL’s injured list around Pittsburgh. But with the preseason roster as thin as it was compared to recent campaigns, the typical slew of battles with the injury bug felt like something too damaging to overcome in 2021.

Logic be damned, though. Here we are. The Penguins have clinched the East and the playoffs are looming.

Head coach Mike Sullivan’s team deserves credit for its perseverance through injuries, coronavirus protocols and a hard division schedule. It also deserves a collective stick tap for its consistency.

The Penguins never lost more than two games in a row. And their point total isn’t artificially inflated by one extended hot stretch of play either. The Pens never won more than six consecutive games.

“That’s what we’ve focused on this year,” defenseman Brian Dumoulin said during Zoom interviews Monday. “We’ve really controlled what we could. We’ve really focused on the next game and not getting too far ahead of ourselves. Thinking about the future and the possibilities of what we can be as a group.”

If you are at this point in the story and you are waiting for a giant “Yeah, but” from me, well, welcome back. You must be a regular reader.

You know me too well. You are hip to the fact that despite my desire to throw rose petals at the feet of the Penguins for all they’ve accomplished thus far in 2021, if they go out in the playoffs’ first round for a third straight season, all that praise gets shaken away like an Etch A Sketch drawing.

We can campaign for Sullivan as NHL Coach of the Year. We can demand Sidney Crosby’s inclusion for Hart and Selke Trophy consideration. We can laud the acquisition of Jeff Carter as a trade that reaped greater rewards than skeptics like me assumed.

But if those guys don’t score much in the playoffs and Sullivan’s team doesn’t advance, a lot of that dialogue will ring hollow a few weeks from now. Because that will mean that the Penguins have failed to win a fourth straight playoff series.

Is that too harsh of an assessment to render given the regular-season trials we just outlined for this club? Some of you might think so.

But I don’t. After all, their playoff failures of 2019 and 2020 are what fueled cynicism heading into 2021.

For a team as rich in talent and championship resumes as the Penguins, to faceplant against the New York Islanders and Montreal Canadiens as they did in those two series was nothing short of humiliating.

“We’ve had some early exits the last couple of years,” forward Jake Guentzel said. “I think it drives you even more. You want to win that much more.”

The Penguins have gotten back into that netherworld they experienced from 2010 to 2015. They are a championship franchise that continues to achieve yet leaves its fan base feeling like they just watched a team underachieve.

That wasn’t the case in 2018. They lost a tight six-game series in overtime to the eventual Stanley Cup champions in the Washington Capitals.

Since then, the Penguins have managed to avoid sliding down the mountain of Stanley Cup contention. But they have stalled in their attempt to ascend it yet again.

“We’re certainly not satisfied with where we are,” Sullivan said. “We know we have a lot of work ahead of us. We know how difficult the challenge is ahead of us. And we are going to use everything that we have in our power to have success.”

How will 2021 weave into that narrative? Tough to say.

If the Penguins win their first series against the Islanders, I think the question then becomes, how do they go out? And who beats them?

If they lose a seven-game back-and-forth slugfest to Boston, I can live with that. If the Bruins sweep them as they did in 2013, I can’t.

If they lose a seven-game epic to the Capitals because Alexander Ovechkin, Evgeny Kuznetsov and John Carlson put on a show, my opinion of 2021 won’t deteriorate much.

Instead, if they fall to the Caps in five games with those guys at half-strength and Conor Sheary or Daniel Sprong carrying the load, I think we all will have a right to be disappointed.

The Penguins have earned credit for exceeding expectations. But they also need to realize how much those expectations have been raised.

The franchise’s regular season has been noble. Yet it will be immediately forgotten unless those players avoid their recent playoff pitfalls.

Brian Metzer of the Penguins Radio Network joins me for Tuesday’s podcast. We talk about challenges the Penguins face when it comes to erasing recent playoff disasters. We preview their pending first-round matchup against the Islanders. And we get into how the battle between the Boston Bruins and Washington Capitals may go down as well.

Listen: Tim Benz and Brian Metzer discuss the Penguins and the playoffs