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Penguins center Evgeni Malkin talks with Sidney Crosby during training camp Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, at UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex.
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The Penguins set out to get younger, deeper, faster and hungrier. Did they?

Matt Freed/Post-Gazette

The Penguins set out to get younger, deeper, faster and hungrier. Did they?

Change was guaranteed after the Penguins failed to win a playoff game for the first time since Sidney Crosby’s rookie year, an ugly ending to an up-and-down season that required them to finish 16-6-5 just to qualify for the playoffs.

After weighing whether to break up their Big 3 and airing some grievances publicly, Jim Rutherford and the Penguins entered the offseason with the stated goal of getting younger, deeper, faster and hungrier before this season.

Leisurely leaning back against the wall while sitting at his locker last week, captain Sidney Crosby, chatting alone with a reporter, scanned the room while pondering whether the organization had accomplished what it set out to do.

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He nodded then replied, “We’ll have to go out and prove that. We’ve got to build that identity. Everything is just talk right now until we get out there. It’s up to everyone else to kind of project and predict. It’s up to us to go out there and play. We’re just excited to get out there and play. It’s been a long offseason.”

Penguins' Alex Galchenyuk is congratulated by Evgeni Malkin  after scoring against the Columbus Blue Jackets in the first period of a preseason NHL hockey game Thursday, Sept. 19, 2019.
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You heard the nice, polite Canadian man. It’s up to us to project and predict, which we will do here by looking at whether the Penguins have indeed gotten young, deeper, faster and hungrier since we last saw them in a real game.

Are they younger?

This is the easiest one. Yes. This process actually started during last season.

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Their 23-man roster for the 2018-19 season opener, that wild 7-6 win against the Washington Capitals at PPG Paints Arena, had an average age of exactly 28 years. Thursday, when the Buffalo Sabres come to town, their average is 26.9.

Sure, the retirement of Matt Cullen brought the mean down. But subtracting that 40-something is balanced out by the team’s core getting another year older, not just Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang, but also important complementary contributors such as Matt Murray, Jake Guentzel and Brian Dumoulin.

The bigger factor in the Penguins being a little greener, which they believe will provide more energy, is Rutherford making moves to fight off Father Time.

Last season, he traded for Marcus Pettersson, Jared McCann, Nick Bjugstad and Erik Gudbranson, who are all between 23 and 27. In the offseason, he swapped Phil Kessel, who just turned 32, for a 25-year-old in Alex Galchenyuk. Fellow newcomers Brandon Tanev and Dominik Kahun are 27 and 24, respectively.

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That means most Penguins are in their prime years. Last season, nine of the 23 players on their opening roster were 30 or older. Right now, they have five.

“It’s a different assortment of guys. You’ve got some younger guys, some older guys, some in-between guys. It’s good to have [that mix],” Bjugstad said. “You don’t want it one way or the other. You want it somewhere in the middle.”

Of course, the players with the biggest contracts and most responsibility fall into the “older guys” category, which is a worry. But the Penguins hope that they have assembled the right mix of young veterans to keep them in contention.

Are they deeper?

On paper, sure. But, as Sid said, the new guys have to go out and prove it.

Their only significant subtraction this offseason was Kessel, who averaged a point per game last season but struggled at 5-on-5. Meanwhile, the Penguins added Galchenyuk, Tanev and Kahun up front and appear to have pulled off a heist by trading a sixth-rounder to Edmonton for 22-year-old blue-liner John Marino.

Getting deeper at forward was essential after the Penguins last season were too often a one-line team. Crosby, Guentzel and whoever their third wheel was on any given night consistently lit the red light to lug the Penguins into the playoffs. The other three lines, notably Malkin’s, couldn’t be counted on to produce.

Galchenyuk and Tanev are expected to start the season on a line with Malkin, who arrived in Pittsburgh motivated and in good shape. Kahun has been skating with Bjugstad and McCann, the latter of whom was a first-liner last year.

That has also bumped down Dominik Simon and Zach Aston-Reese, two wingers who got looks in top-six roles, onto a fourth line centered by Teddy Blueger.

“We wanted to get younger, faster and be more difficult to play against,” coach Mike Sullivan said this summer. “The players [we] acquired checked a lot of those boxes.”

For better or worse, the blue-line group is about the same. Just sub in Marino for Olli Maatta, who was dealt to Chicago in exchange for Kahun and cap relief.

Their top four — Letang, Dumoulin, Pettersson and Justin Schultz — are collectively pretty good. But with Jack Johnson still here, for now at least, and Gudbranson still a question mark, concern about those two is certainly understandable.

Are they faster?

Theoretically, they should be, at least a little bit. But will that actually show?

Last season, the Penguins still had plenty of guys with wheels. But they rarely were able to play the up-tempo style that helped them win their recent Stanley Cups because they had so much trouble getting the puck out of their zone.

Their issues with the breakout, plus careless decisions in the offensive zone, led to their opponents often getting more odd-man rushes than the Penguins.

So the Penguins must play smarter and with more precision this season.

But if you were to line everybody up, tell them to go goal line to goal line and then blow a whistle, this team would probably get there a little quicker.

It was not a coincidence that the Penguins said goodbye to two of their slowest regulars, Maatta and bruising forward Garrett Wilson. And while Kessel could still get going when he wanted to, he appeared to have lost a gear last season.

On the flip side, Tanev, according to Malkin at least, is maybe the fastest player in the league. At least it feels that way because Tanev is so relentless. Kahun is more quick than fast but he’s certainly not slowing the Penguins down. Galchenyuk is considered to be an average to above-average skater at the NHL level.

Pittsburgh isn’t suddenly one of the NHL’s fastest squads again. But Rutherford saw signs during the preseason that his Penguins will be a “team with speed.”

“It showed in Detroit [on Sept. 22],” Rutherford said. “They’re a team that can really skate. You go back to the last couple of years when we played, it seemed like they were quicker than we were. But without a full lineup, we were able to keep up with their speed. So that’s a good sign of what’s to come here.”

Are they hungrier?

Three of these attributes can be quantified. The hunger is the burning question, one we can’t possibly be sure about in early October.

All offseason, Rutherford was critical of his club, talking about how some players became complacent last season. Sullivan was more subtle about it, instead raving about how the new guys want to be here and do what it takes to win a Cup.

Crosby, asked about the assessments of his coach and GM, didn’t disagree.

“There definitely needed to be a little more hunger. I think when you get swept, you have something lacking,” the captain said. “We’ve got to come back and we need to find a way to get better. But you also look back [and recognize that] we found a way to get 100 points with a lot of injuries. And that’s not easy.”

He believes their “mentality is in the right spot” exiting the preseason.

“I think there’s a good energy. The guys who played last year, we weren’t happy with the way things finished and everybody’s pretty motivated. The guys that are new, they’re bringing a lot of great energy and they’re excited to be here and be a part of it,” he said. “We’re going to have to build our identity together.”

But do these Penguins have the youth, depth, speed and, most important, hunger to be contenders again? We’ll find that out over the next six months.

“I’m excited about the group we have,” Sullivan said Wednesday. “I told those guys that on the ice. We have the opportunity to be a real competitive hockey team. But, as I’ve always said, nothing is inevitable. We’ve got to go out and earn it.”

Matt Vensel: mvensel@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mattvensel.

First Published: October 3, 2019, 9:45 a.m.

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