Trade Kris Letang.
Trade Evgeni Malkin, too.
But first, let's strap Jack Johnson on a rocket ship to the Moon, burn Matt Murray's glove and Mark Recchi's power-play whiteboard for the rocket fuel, make sure it doesn't fail to launch like a Justin Schultz look from the point, nor steer off course like a Conor Sheary penalty shot, then strand Patrick Marleau up there forever to be remembered with his fellow contemporaries of the original Space Age.
Am I doing this right?
OK, how about if Nick Bjugstad gets tossed into the vessel's infirmary and Dominik Simon into its advanced analytics lab?
Still not enough?
Everyone but Sidney Crosby?
The Penguins are home from the Stanley Cup playoffs. I'm betting you've heard. After four months of waiting followed by four flat qualifying-round games against the 24th-seeded Canadiens in a 24-team tournament, they've been formally bounced from the Toronto bubble, now left with yet another four months to face a future that's ... wow, what is it?
This isn't 2013, when the Jarome Iginla cameo came crashing down in the Eastern final. Crosby, Malkin and Letang were still in their 20s. The core was still the core. There was time, as 2016 and 2017 would powerfully illustrate.
This isn't 2018, when Evgeny Kuznetsov's breakaway abruptly buried the three-peat bid. That was a hard-fought loss to the eventual champ. No shame in that. And the group deserved yet another chance.
This isn't 2019, either, even though the upstart Islanders tore through the Penguins in four straight. Merited or not, that opponent felt as if it were skating on some other level, at least in the moment.
No, this isn't any of those.
This was the single worst series loss of the Crosby/Malkin era, and there isn't a close second. It wasn't just about the upset. It was was being outplayed, outworked, out-everything-ed. It might not have been the most painful series loss, seemingly popping up out of nowhere following the pandemic shutdown, but it was the most embarrassing and the most ... exposing, if you will. Because it was the first one, at least from this perspective, that made clear that the days are over of the core carrying the Penguins to championships.
And if that isn't now evident to all of this organization's decision-makers, chiefly Jim Rutherford, then they're all due for one serious grounding before launching anyone out of here.
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