January 14, 2015
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
The NFL’s conference championships offer a chance to tackle the Steelers’ 2015 schedule, Keith Butler’s first priority, the fine art of fumbling, the fallacy of big/small market mentalities, the deification of Mike Pereira and my game predictions.
January 14, 2015
Olli Maatta passes the puck in a Nov. 26 game against the Maple Leafs at Consol. — GETTY
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
News: Olli Maatta’s shoulder will undergo surgery Wednesday, ending his season, the Penguins announced minutes after the Tuesday game against the Wild.
Views: Man, what else could have gone wrong for the kid?
Maatta’s 20th birthday came in August, and it was accompanied by a hard push through training camp to overcome his May shoulder surgery, then the thyroid cancer that cost him a month, then the mumps, and now a second surgery on the same shoulder. As Sidney Crosby and others have noted, he’s tough, and he’ll have to be. This will be a lot of time away from doing what he loves, and that can make any of us a little loopy. What’s more, he’ll come back to the next camp with lingering questions about the stability of the shoulder.
There will be another question, too: Was Maatta allowed to return too soon?
January 13, 2015
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
Welcome to Tuesday 12 Qs, our chat that takes place each week at 2 p.m. and offers you a chance to carry the conversation. I’ll be up at Consol tonight to cover Penguins-Wild with a full column, but all topics are welcome, as always.
Use the comments section below to submit an entry. No more than one per person, please. Submit early if you prefer, and I’ll pick from that batch to get rolling, then monitor new entries once we go live.
UPDATE 2 p.m.: And off we go …
Wild Bill: Dejan, your News/Views entry today offers your view that Keith Butler will transition to the younger players. Does he, in your opinion, present any other likely forms of change to what the Steelers do on defense? Or will it be mostly the same scheme, but only slightly tweaked?
Until Butler speaks — and there will be no actual press conference, I was just told by a team official — there won’t be a hard answer to that. He’s never been a coordinator in the NFL, so it would be unfair to assume too much based on his work as a positional coach. That said, I find it unimaginable that either he or Mike Tomlin would alter the 3-4 scheme or, for that matter, the zone-blitz element on which it’s founded. Remember, this is Tomlin’s move. He’s getting the coordinator he wants and the defense he wants. If he didn’t want this base defense, he could have changed it long ago, even with Dick LeBeau is present. To think otherwise is naive.
January 13, 2015
Keith Butler instructs rookie linebacker Howard Jones during a preseason game this past August. — GETTY
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
News: Keith Butler will, indeed, be the Steelers’ new defensive coordinator, according to a report by Gerry Dulac in the Post-Gazette. That corroborates the information that led me to write on this site in a Saturday piece that Butler would be the choice to replace Dick LeBeau. An announcement by the team, per the report, could come Tuesday.
UPDATE 11:02 a.m.: The Steelers make this official.
Views: There’s nothing not to like about this move.
Butler, 58, is immensely qualified for this opportunity. Overqualified, actually. There aren’t many NFL positional coaches who stay a dozen years in one role, let alone one place. But Butler has served as the Steelers’ linebackers coach since 2003 — hired by Bill Cowher — and did likewise for the Browns the previous four seasons. Some will attach a stigma to that, but that’s unfair. Several teams offered Butler defensive coordinator interviews and even jobs, and he turned them down, in part because of his loyalty to Mike Tomlin and the Rooneys, in part — probably a larger part — because the team compensated him well to stay put. Regardless, he could have been doing this job somewhere else two, three years ago, maybe further back.
January 12, 2015
Mike Johnston gathers his players to explain the next drill at practice Monday at Consol. — DEJAN KOVACEVIC
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
There’s a reflexive response when examining the Penguins’ recently putrid power play to gloss right over the most glaring problem. Or, I should say, problems:
• Sidney Crosby has two power-play goals in his past 35 games, including that oasis of an overtime blast Saturday night in Montreal.
• Evgeni Malkin has one power-play goal in his past 20 games.
• Chris Kunitz has two in his past 23 games.
• Kris Letang has none in his past 27 games.
These four players make up the foundation of the Penguins’ power play. They have for years, actually. And if they don’t score — which, clearly, they haven’t in quite some time — the onus falls to that fifth player, whoever that might be. And unless that fifth player is a 25-year-old firebombing Brett Hull, it won’t matter.
“We’ve got to score,” Crosby was telling me Monday after practice at Consol. “That’s the bottom line. We’ve got people who can score, and we’ve got to score.”
January 12, 2015
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
A look at the week ahead on the site …
• Monday: The Penguins are back on the ice in preparation for their Tuesday visit from the Wild. I’ll have a full column from Consol about the increasingly excruciating power play.
• Tuesday: Tuesday 12 Qs is at 2 p.m. At night, a full column off Penguins-Wild.
• Wednesday: Morning Java video will go up first thing. At 5:30 p.m., my weekly visit to 105.9 the X to have at it with Mark Madden. At night, Mario Lemieux on ice.
January 14, 2015
Column: Hey, Penguins, this could have been you
by Dejan Kovacevic • Columns • Penguins
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.
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