ELMONT, N.Y. — Erik Karlsson sat in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ dark locker room after the final morning skate of the season Wednesday in New York, his usual smile replaced by a frown.
“Five fucking years,” he said, shaking his head.
It’s been two years since the Penguins last qualified for the playoffs, but the drought is longer for Karlsson. He hasn’t appeared in the playoffs since May 2019, when his San Jose Sharks fell to the St. Louis Blues in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals – a game Karlsson didn’t play in due to injury.
The Karlsson trade to Pittsburgh was supposed to resurrect the Penguins and send the future Hall of Fame defenseman back to the playoffs. It achieved neither objective.
“I think it’s been an underperforming season for a lot of us,” he said. “I think we’re a much better team than we’ve been in 81 games this season. But at the same time, we do all this to ourselves. That’s what’s frustrating.
Karlsson had a lot of power when San Jose general manager Mike Grier was looking for a trade partner last season and made it clear he preferred Pittsburgh.
The bitter disappointment of the last six months has not embittered him towards the city or the organization.
“I love Pittsburgh,” he said. “I really do. It’s been great. This is where I want to be. I was so excited to come to Pittsburgh and obviously it didn’t turn out the way anyone wanted or the way anyone thought it would. .But the good thing is I’ve been here for a year now I see how things are going, I see things in more depth now that I’ve been here a while. here. I think everything will be better for this team in the future.
Karlsson has never won the Stanley Cup, but understands the Penguins, who were officially eliminated from the playoffs Tuesday night, still have championship expectations.
“We are a huge disappointment,” he said. “Huge. We underperformed so much and it’s very disappointing. There’s no other way to say it.
One problem stands out among the others.
The Penguins, who boast future Hall of Famers such as Karlsson, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang and accomplished NHL scorers such as Bryan Rust, Rickard Rakell, Jeff Carter and Michael Bunting, rank 31st in 32 teams with a conversation rating of 14.6. rate on the power play.
But in reality, no team was worse on the power play. Even though the Flyers rank behind the Penguins, they have only allowed five shorthanded goals this season. The Penguins have allowed a league-leading 12.
“I know, I know,” Karlsson said. “People should ask us about the power play. It’s the worst in the league.
For what?
“Here’s the thing,” Karlsson began. “It’s not just a power play thing. This is really not the case. It’s an accumulation of a lot of things that happened throughout the season. We just could never find a solution because there was so much going on.
Karlsson didn’t go into detail, but described how psychologically the Penguins were stuck on the power play.
“We tried really hard to sort everything out, but we never really got there,” he said. “We couldn’t get out of the situation. This is what is happening. When you’re in something as incredibly deep as we all were on the power play, I think it actually becomes harder to see and understand what the solution is. You try to get yourself out of this state of mind. You try and try. You want to get rid of that feeling that you have, that something is wrong on the power play and you want to fix it. But we couldn’t.
Karlsson said everyone was equally blamed.
“Oh, it’s all of our responsibility,” he said. “We are much better than what we showed this year. I know it.
By his high standards, Karlsson was passable this season but far from his best.
Heading into Wednesday’s meaningless season finale against the Islanders in the playoffs, Karlsson had 11 goals and 55 points. For most defenders, it’s been a pretty offensive season.
For Karlsson, who is a year away from recording 25 goals and 101 points and winning his third Norris Trophy, it was a disappointing season. His defensive errors were expected and sometimes profound.
The same was true for his offensive genius. Given the talent surrounding Karlsson – on the power play and alongside Crosby or Malkin’s line – it defies logic that the Penguins haven’t been more lethal offensively and made the playoffs .
“I know we have a better team than this,” Karlsson said. “We are capable of more than that.”
Karlsson doesn’t know what to expect this summer, but he hopes team president/general manager Kyle Dubas doesn’t blow up the roster.
Karlsson wants another chance and will likely get his wish thanks to the glut of locker room locker room clauses limiting what Dubas can do.
“Well, let’s just put it this way,” Karlsson said. “I just hope we’ll be together a little longer, because that way we’ll have another chance to show what we can do. I think we learned a lot this season. I just want the power play to not be a problem starting next season. It snowballed into us and we never got out of it. But I know we are much better than that and I want us to have the chance to prove it.
Remarks
• Alex Nedeljkovic will start against the Islanders on Wednesday night, meaning he will have started the final 13 games of the season.
• Emil Bemstrom is unavailable against the Islanders, coach Mike Sullivan said. A Bemstrom hat trick against the Islanders, improbable as it was, would have forced the Penguins to give up a third-round pick instead of a sixth-round pick to the Columbus Blue Jackets at the end of the trade that brought Bemstrom to Pittsburgh.
• Speaking of hat tricks, Malkin enters the final game of the season with three goals to reach the 500th mark of his career.
• Karlsson does not know if he will represent the Swedish team at the next World Championships in Prague.
You can buy tickets for every NHL game here.
(Photo: Michael Reaves/Getty Images)