Column: Hey, Penguins, this could have been you

The Wild’s Ryan Suter is stripped of the puck by David Perron, who scored twice Tuesday for the Penguins. — GETTY

BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC

What a sorry mess this was.

And it could have been all yours, Pittsburgh. It almost was.

The door to the visiting coaches’ room at Consol Energy Center was closed late Tuesday night, crammed with Minnesota front-office officials and the crumbling remains of Mike Yeo’s tenure as the Wild’s coach. If he wasn’t getting fired after this one, a 7-2 tapdance by the visibly bemused Penguins, then it surely will come soon. This wasn’t the first strike. The Wild have lost six in a row, 14 of 16 and are way out of the Western playoff race despite a seriously rich roster.

And by rich, I’m talking money, not talent or heart. More on that in a bit.

As the bigwigs filed out of the office one by one, only Yeo was paraded before the firing squad that was a handful of us reporter types. He was walked over to a sponsored screen in the hallway, and we gathered around to ask, in essence, why his team looked as if it would rather have been shoveling snow unclothed in a St. Paul blizzard than playing hockey.

Here was our exchange specifically …

Well, he can call it what he wants. But if that team didn’t quit, it’ll take some leap of logic to explain a fiasco in which the Penguins’ defensemen routinely were being sprung for breakaways, in which Marcel ‘The Golden’ Goc looked an offensive dynamo and in which — hide the women and children — Zach ‘Rocket’ Sill put up his first career NHL point. In his 47th career NHL game.

Sorry, not buying. Nor was I anywhere near as impressed as Yeo was in that response up there that his players would keep their own door closed for 32 full minutes after the final horn, 22 more than allowed by NHL rules. Because whatever might have been bandied about in there undoubtedly required tenfold the energy that had been expended in the event at hand.

And this is where our story will digress. Way back to the Fourth of July, 2012.

If you’re a diehard fans of the Penguins, you should remember that date. Because you were mighty disappointed that Minnesota made off with what many saw as the hockey heist of the century. The Wild wrapped up both Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, an All-Star forward and his buddy the All-Star defenseman, to matching contracts, each spanning 13 years and $98 million. And just like that, the franchise that had been boring fans to tears with a defense-first approach for a decade, one that hadn’t won a single playoff series since 2003, was transformed into contender status.

Oh, the sadness in our commonwealth that day. Not just on this end, either. See, it turned out — and I had this reaffirmed by a Minnesota source Tuesday night — that there were two teams that had bid higher on Parise and Sutter as a package: One was the Penguins at $105 million, the other the Flyers at $112 million. Both were for the same 13 years.

Wow. Imagine that.

From the Penguins’ perspective, I mean.

Had Ray Shero gotten his way that summer, had his many overtures made any headway, had Mario Lemieux’s and Ron Burkle’s open wallets been enticing enough, had Sidney Crosby’s countless calls to his old pal Parise — he was even getting chummy with the Parise family at the time — paid off with those two coming to Pittsburgh … well, be thankful it didn’t.

What’s more, let it be a lesson that winning the offseason isn’t the same as winning the season.

I’ll tell you right here what would have happened: Parise and Suter would have counted a combined $15 million against the cap the past two seasons and for the next 11. We know that much definitively. There’s no way to pinpoint, obviously, what impact that might have had on the moves already made, not least of which was Shero losing his job. Far too many variables are in play. But I feel comfortable at least guessing that Kris Letang never would have gotten his eight-year, $58 million extension. And that Marc-Andre Fleury never would have gotten his recent four-year, $23 million extension. And that, in general, the Penguins, even with Crosby and Evgeni Malkin signed to fair terms, would have been doomed to a dollar-store supporting cast for the next decade or so.

And from there, if you really want to ramp this up, why would Crosby and/or Malkin want to stay?

This isn’t exaggeration, either, and here’s why: Parise and Suter are supporting cast.

Parise has had his moments, sure. The Devils’ 2012 run to the Stanley Cup final stands out, with his eight goals and seven assists in 15 games that led directly into the big payday. But he was never really even the best player in New Jersey, let alone some league star. Suter has had more moments than Parise, especially in Nashville, where he was steady, reliable and, in being paired with Shea Weber, made up half of the league’s best duo. Suter also went on to be a Norris Trophy finalist with the Wild in 2013 — Letang and eventual winner P.K. Subban were the others — as well as a tireless performer who logged an average of nearly a half-hour per game. But again, going back to the context of the contracts and other offers, it’s hard to see Suter in that scope any more than Parise.

What happened, as it so often does in professional sports, is that general managers got wide-eyed. They were tantalized. They had a chance to spend a ton of money on not one but two good players and not give up anything hockey-related in return. One can see where that would be intoxicating.

But they aren’t special. Not near that level. They weren’t then, and they aren’t now.

These two players have won nothing in Minnesota. And, if I dare break the border that separates all hockey talk between NHL and Olympics, both were immense disappointments for the United States in Sochi. Parise had one goal, no assists in six games, Suter no goals, three assists and a plus-2. Both were sensationally invisible in the elimination loss to Canada, an event that, had either performed up to their financially assigned level of stardom, easily could have had that 1-0 outcome flipped.

What was worse, both petulantly rolled Dan Bylsma under the bus.

“We sat back,” Suter said to a group of us, fresh off the ice. “We were passive.”

And after the Americans shamefully folded to Finland, 5-0, in a bronze-medal game that saw Parise and Suter look just about as interested as they did Tuesday night, Parise said this: “We were passive. We had one forechecker at times, let them break out of their zone.”

Both those remarks were shots at Bylsma. I was there. I heard them. I knew the context.

Don’t misunderstand, please. I ripped Bylsma, too. But I’m not one of his players, never mind a key cog in a national program that no longer needs a Miracle to win gold, just some intestinal fortitude.

If Parise and/or Suter have that, I haven’t seen it.

They chose Minnesota for sappy reasons, not to win. If they were serious, they’d have come to Pittsburgh or — yes, I’ll say it — gone to Philadelphia. And they’ve delivered exactly what everyone should have expected: The Wild stink. They’re 18-19-5 and soon might be sharing rent with the Oilers and Sabres. And on top of that, they’re making it painfully obvious that they want Yeo gone, no matter how they counter that.

Sure enough, after this loss, it was Parise and Suter speaking for the room because … well, who else on that roster would or could?

Here was Parise, on the Penguins’ tapdance: “We’re so easy to play against. We lose battles, we don’t bump off draws, the details of our game are terrible … we don’t even make it hard on the other team. They tic-tac-toe right around us.”

Malkin did so much of that he was both the Xs and the Os.

Here was Suter: “We just … when things start to go wrong for us, we unravel.”

He’s done plenty of that. He was a minus-4 on this night, now minus-22 for his past 20 games, and he might have unraveled in another way by elbowing Steve Downie into a possible concussion in the second period. Suter maintained his innocence when I asked about the incident — “I’m not that type of player,” he replied — and issued an apology to Downie through Crosby. But the NHL’s Department of Hilarious Inconsistency undoubtedly will review the tape and … oh, who am I kidding?

This was Parise. This was Suter. This was the team they chose.

Be very glad they did.