Damien Cox: Penguins have to decide between retooling and rebuilding, and they’ll do it without Brian Burke and Ron Hextall

It’s not the fault of either Brian Burke or Ron Hextall that Sidney Crosby was born in 1987 and already has 18 NHL seasons under his belt.

Nature, as they say, is undefeated, and Sid the Kid is getting old. He’s still pretty great — and just finished putting up a 93-point season — but if Canada was putting together an Olympic squad today, would Crosby, the hero of 2010, still be on it? Debate that one with your friends.

The point is, the 35-year-old Crosby could no longer cover over all the weaknesses and vulnerabilities on the Pittsburgh Penguins with his extraordinary talent and work ethic. In fact, even seasons from Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in which neither missed a single game was enough for the Penguins, who will miss the Stanley Cup playoffs this spring for the first time since Crosby’s rookie season.

The Penguins won back-to-back Cups in 2016 and 2017 but since then have been deteriorating, little by little, with each successive season. All those efforts to mask that deterioration by making short-term improvements and sacrificing futures had to come with a cost, and the bill came due this week.

The misfortune for Burke and Hextall, hired to run the team in 2021 and let go Friday along with assistant general manager Chris Pryor, was that they arrived too late to benefit from the true greatness of Crosby. The long-term damage of trying to continue to win as long as Nos. 87 and 71 were around had mostly been done, and there really wasn’t much that Burke, the director of hockey operations, and Hextall, the GM, could do to turn the process around quickly. The team hasn’t had a top-20 draft pick in more than a decade. Where was the talent to support and ultimately replace Crosby et al supposed to come from?

Burke and Hextall were an intriguing pairing from the start. Burke, frequently impetuous during his executive career, seemed a fit for a team that wanted to keep winning after the sudden departure of Jim Rutherford. Hextall, on the other hand, came over from Philadelphia, where his philosophies of gradual growth and careful cap management were not appreciated. Plus, he had a reputation as a poor team player who didn’t like to share information.

So what was going to be the guiding philosophy of the Penguins with those two in charge? Slow and steady? Or damn the consequences and do whatever it takes to win now?

It ended up being neither. At least the team didn’t trade away its first-round pick last year or this year, a nod to the idea the team would have to start rebuilding at some point. But the decision was made to deal defenceman Mike Matheson for Jeff Petry last summer, giving up six years while adding a big cap hit. And Bryan Rust, 29, got a six-year contract worth more than $30 million (U.S.).

The roster was top heavy. The Penguins had five players who scored 27 goals or more this season, but after that the team got very thin, very fast. The goaltending was weakened by injuries. Still, Burke and Hextall plunged forward, giving up draft picks at this year’s trade deadline while pointlessly adding veterans like Mikael Granlund, Nick Bonino and Dmitry Kulikov.

There was simply no appetite in Pittsburgh for doing anything but finding more players who might be able to help Crosby win. The challenge for new management will be to convince ownership the time has come to rebuild. That time, actually, was two or three years ago.

The Boston Bruins are the model team for other NHL clubs that think they can retool without rebuilding and, yes, somehow, the Bruins have done just that. They won the Cup in 2011, and 12 years later, they just finished one of the best regular seasons in NHL history.

But the list of teams that have tried to avoid rebuilding, and then been reduced to rubble, is longer: Chicago, Vancouver and Philadelphia, among others. The problem for a team like Pittsburgh is how to get the process started. The Canucks felt powerless to even start rebuilding while the Sedin twins were still there, and the Blackhawks had to consider the needs of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews before it was obvious to everyone that they could no longer afford to do so.

Crosby, Malkin and Kris Letang are unlikely to want to play for a team that needs to lose a lot of hockey games over the next two or three seasons to get better. Trading Crosby seems unthinkable but you can’t leave him the last man standing by moving out the other two, either.

This is not an easy puzzle to solve because it involves egos and legacies. Moreover, Pittsburgh has only become a consistently great hockey market since Crosby arrived. Before that, the team was bankrupt, a situation it had been in before. So ownership may have to be willing to take a revenue hit while the team does what is necessary to find the next generation of outstanding Penguins.

Really, Burke, Hextall and Pryor just got caught in the slipstream here. Sure, they made some questionable decisions. But they were not empowered to tear the team down and start over, even if that would have been their idea.

The Fenway Sports Group, owners of the Boston Red Sox among other things, bought control of the Penguins from Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle in 2021. We’re now likely to see the new owners flex their muscles and demonstrate the direction they want this team to take.

This has been a marquee NHL franchise for 18 years. Staying that way is going to be a massive challenge.