It Was Past Time for Mike Sullivan and Penguins to Part Ways

Now, will Kyle Dubas get the hard part right?

It probably should have happened at least a year or two ago. Lord knows that if the Penguins did business like the rest of the NHL, it would have happened three or four years ago. Either way, it’s done. Mike Sullivan is no longer the team’s head coach, either because General Manager Kyle Dubas decided it was time, or Sullivan decided he wanted the chance to coach the Rangers, who just sealed the deal with him, and are set to make him the highest-paid coach in league history, per ESPN’s Emily Kaplan.

Scotty Bowman is the best coach to have ever stepped behind the bench for the Penguins, but Sullivan is the best Penguins coach there has ever been. That distinction should not be hard to understand, though if you test that theory on X, The Everything App, Formerly Known as Twitter, you’ll find ample evidence to the contrary.

Sullivan racked up 409 wins with the Penguins, became the first coach in the NHL to lead a team to back-to-back Stanley Cups in the salary cap era, and implemented a style of play that, when at its best, was incredibly pleasing on an aesthetic level, while also being supremely effective. It’s also because of Sullivan that the Crosby-Malkin-Letang era looks like a smashing success instead of a, “They only won one title together?” time period.

So yeah, Sullivan’s legacy with the Pens is quite secure. But things had gotten very stale. The team at Sullivan’s disposal got worse, there’s no question about that, but his dogged backing of Tristan Jarry was a major miss, and his reluctance to give bigger minutes to younger players on a steady basis was both chafing and puzzling to fans.

That specific criticism might have chafed Sullivan even more, for what it’s worth.

The past is past, though, and now the Penguins have to move forward. They ought to avoid falling into the classic trap that seems to claim most NHL teams in search of a new coach – hiring a retread. You’ll hear Rick Tocchet’s name thrown around in the coming days and weeks. Joel Quenneville, out of the league for a few years now – and for very good reason – is under consideration to be Anaheim’s next coach.

Name your favorite out-of-work coach who was once successful to one degree or another, and chances are they’re going to get talked about as a potential candidate for an open job, maybe multiple open jobs. Professional hockey is not exactly known for ingenuity and outside-the-box thinking when it comes to hiring coaches. That’s why Peter Laviolette is currently the betting favorite to be the next Penguins head coach, and why John Tortorella will also get some burn.

For better or worse, everything that happens to the Penguins moving forward will be on Kyle Dubas. Sullivan had a rare level of juice, as head coaches go. The aforementioned back-to-back Cups tended to help in that department. This is Dubas’ show now, and other than Sidney Crosby, there’s no one with more power in the organization. Well, except ownership, but I’m convinced FSG is just a group of anonymous, serious-looking businessmen in a dimly-lit conference room, observing the performance of one of their investments from afar. But I digress.

Dubas’ contract situation means he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Now that the true nature of this rebuild is apparent to everyone, he can play the long game. He’s already been stockpiling draft picks; he should take the same approach and hire an up-and-comer to be his next head coach. Specifically, someone who’s never been a head coach before. The next Penguins coach should be trusted to both oversee the bottoming-out of the team (probably next year, hopefully only part of the 2026-27 season), then hopefully rise with them in the years to follow.

There’s a school of thought that posits that the Penguins should in fact hire a retread so that said retread can eat the worst of what’s to come, and then hand things off to a coach on the rise. I see two issues with that approach:

First, why would any coach agree to do a job for two to three years, knowing they’re going to fail, and second, wouldn’t it be better to let someone come in with lower expectations, learn on the job, and then grow with the team and be perfectly in sync with them when it’s time to win? There’s risk with that second strategy, perhaps more than with the first, but it’s the direction I would go. It would also show that Dubas is trying to look more than one move ahead.

Dubas is Canada’s general manager for the IIHF World Championship in Stockholm, so he’ll be out of the country for most of this month. As a result, the search to find the next head coach could take a while. The Athletic’s Josh Yohe posited that it could take an entire month.

Normally, I get antsy if a coaching search takes that long, but if Dubas is looking at the right names, guys on the rise, then the time frame shouldn’t matter as much. They’re not all going to get snapped up, mainly because some teams will always go for the “name” candidate.

Here’s hoping Dubas doesn’t fall into that trap. He’s got all the power, he’s got the job security, he’s got the backing of ownership. This hire represents his biggest opportunity to put his stamp on this organization, to telegraph how he feels about its future, to chart the course of the next five to seven years.

A young coach on the rise is what the Penguins need. Whether Kyle Dubas agrees with that sentiment remains to be seen.