The Penguins are not bringing back associate coach Todd Reirden next season, the club announced Friday. He was on an expiring contract.
Reirden has served on head coach Mike Sullivan’s staff for the past four seasons, overseeing their power play and defense corps. The Penguins hired the former NHL defenseman in the 2020 offseason after he was let go as head coach of the Capitals, a role he held for two years.
Over Reirden’s tenure, the Penguins have had one of the most consistently underwhelming man-advantage units in the league. Their 19.9% power play success rate over the past four seasons ranks 18th in the NHL, surprisingly low considering the talent level of Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel, Kris Letang and Evgeni Malkin that they’ve had at their disposal nearly the entire time. General manager Kyle Dubas gave Reirden a new toy to play with when he acquired elite offensive blue-liner Erik Karlsson this summer, but it somehow had a worse effect. Pittsburgh’s power play clicked at just 15.3% this season, only ahead of the Blue Jackets (15.1%) and Flyers (12.2%).
The Penguins were middle-of-the-pack defensively, allowing 30.2 shots per game, only 0.4 more than the league median this season. The pairing of Karlsson and Marcus Pettersson had a strong campaign at even strength, controlling 54.7% of expected goals when deployed together, per MoneyPuck. But free-agent signing Ryan Graves struggled in his top-four role, posting worse results than Pettersson when utilized with both Karlsson and Letang.
Pittsburgh finished just three points out of the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference this season. Even an average power play and slightly improved results from Graves likely would have given them the two additional wins they needed to return to postseason action.
Reirden becomes a free agent, and while he likely won’t be under consideration for any head coaching vacancies, could still land on an NHL bench somewhere next season. Before assuming the head coaching job with Washington in 2018, he’d spent four years there as an associate and assistant coach under Barry Trotz. His first NHL gig came with the Penguins in 2008, serving as the assistant and head coach for AHL Wilkes-Barre/Scranton for three years before spending another four as an NHL assistant.
Penguins imitating Steelers here kidding themselves that changing an assistant will have significant impacts. These players do what they want on the power play and no coach is going to stop it.
With the Steelers, if they keep Tomlin from making game decisions and exerting his poor clock management, they might just make it deep into playoffs in spite of him.
Oh if you only knew how Pens fans are rejoicing about this news. Xmas has come early in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh has had some of the worse offensive coaches in sports
Steelers – Matt Canada
Pens – Reirden
Pirates hitting coach – Andy Haines
Pens power play has been a problem since they dealt away Hornqvist. Constantly looking for the tic tic toe instead of just bombing the net.
Our entire offense is tic tac toe. I know they want to get younger and by all means, get younger if you can, but get some shooters.
Bomb the net, get rebounds, get tips, embrace chaos…they hate chaos, but that’s how most good PP’s work.
Also, while we’re at it…it’s been YEARS since I saw a Penguin do a toe drag (or in any other way change the angle of the shot to make it harder for the goalie) before shooting.
Sullivan’s leash is probably playoffs or bust in my opinion now. I get the old heads don’t want to break in a new coach but if you don’t make it 3 years running on top of no series wins since 2017. It’s time to for a change cause nostalgia is worthless when times aren’t well. If this team isn’t close to playoffs at the deadline I pray they don’t hold out hope and just sell.
glad they didn’t pin this on dubas yet .. so he gets another year to keep wrecking the penguins