Pittsburgh Penguins CEO and president David Morehouse told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Friday that head coach Mike Johnston, along with general manager Jim Rutherford and star centers Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby, would be returning to the club for the 2015-16 season.
Not only will they returning, Morehouse said that the Penguins’ upper management “never considered” replacing the team’s GM or head coach. In Johnston’s case, it will be a much-deserved second chance to establish himself as a successful NHL head coach.
When the Penguins hired Johnston in 2014, he was a bit of an unknown. He wasn’t a hot-ticket hire, but he did come with an established track record of success.
His Portland Winterhawks teams had been to the Western Hockey league finals for four consecutive seasons, and he had developed an effective designed to play o strengths of his team’s corps of elite offensive defenseman.
The Winterhawks had seven defensemen drafted by NHL teams in Johnston’s five-year tenure with the club, including two second-round picks, and three first-rounders: Penguins draft choices Joe Morrow and Derrick Pouliot and Nashville’s fourth overall pick in 2013, Seth Jones.
Johnston’s system, it seemed, would be a perfect fit to maximize the Penguins’ greatest strength: the plethora of talented defensemen acquired and drafted under former general manager Ray Shero.
At the beginning of the season, the Penguins’ blueline featured Kris Letang, Olli Maatta, Christian Ehrhoff and Paul Martin, with promising rookie Pouliot waiting in the wings in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
The Penguins jumped out to a blistering start, winning 13 of their first 17 games. In those first 17 games, Letang had 13 points, Maatta had six, Ehrhoff had five, and Martin had four. The four offensive-minded defensemen were a big part of the team’s success and Johnston’s tactics.
By the time the postseason rolled around, only Martin remained as the Penguins defensive corps was beset by injuries. Instead of a quartet of offensive dynamos, Johnston was left with Ben Lovejoy, Ian Cole and Rob Scuderi to round out his top four.
Johnston scrapped his up-tempo, puck possession system for a simpler style aimed at protecting his battered defensemen. The results were mixed. The defense was still effective, allowing just 11 goals in their five-game series with the New York Rangers.
However, the defenders’ inability to cleanly break out of the zone continually hampered the Penguins’ offense, which scored just four goals in the team’s four losses.
Despite the team’s lack of success on the ice, the main reason that Johnston was hired nearly a year ago remains: the Penguins will again have a cadre of elite puck-moving defenseman, with Letang and Maatta returning from injury and Pouliot stepping into a full-time role.
Unless the Penguins think they have a chance at landing Detroit Red Wings head coach Mike Babcock, there are few slam-dunk coaching candidates on the market this offseason. If Johnston proves not to be able replicate last season’s early success, the group of coaches that the Penguins could replace him with in the middle of next season wouldn’t be all that different than the ones that they would be choosing from right now.
For Penguins management, retaining Johnston is low risk and high reward. If the first half of the 2014-15 season — and his five years in the junior ranks — are indicative of the coach that they’ll have going forward, they would be foolish to send him away. If the Penguins spend the fall of 2015 re-living the nightmare that was this spring, they’ll have lost little in finding out.
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