GM destroyed the Crosby, Malkin and Letang dynasty.

This time in 2022, the Pittsburgh Penguins held on to their status as a competitive hockey franchise. Sidney Crosby, their franchise center and one of the top five players of all time, was 34 years old. Evgeni Malkin, theirs other franchise center and 30-plus-year historic talent, was 35 years old and playing out the final days of his contract. Kris Letang, their franchise quarterback and also a top 100 player of all time (just ask the experts) was 34 years old and, like Malkin, in the final weeks of his contract. It was highly unlikely that the three superstars would stick together, and even more unlikely that they would all continue to provide elite play at the same time. After blowing a 31-game lead and losing their first-round series to the New York Rangers, the Penguins looked poised to finally fall into the abyss.

But the hockey gods blessed the Penguins, as they have so often over the past 40 years. The team made a good business move by signing Malkin and Letang to contracts that should last the rest of his career. (They also got lucky, as both players agreed to waive free agency.) Then Malkin, Letang and Crosby all spent another year beating Father Time and being among the best players in the world. Crosby and Malkin haven’t missed a single game in the team’s 81 games; Crosby has 91 points and Malkin has 83 points. Letang has had a hell of a season off the ice but still managed to score 39 points in 63 games from the blue line while often controlling games. The Penguins kept their trio together for an NHL-record 17 times^th season as teammates, and they all went on to score. The team was lucky and should have made the playoffs, not coincidentally, in 17th place^th year in a row.

It does not. The Penguins capped off a spectacular collapse with a home loss to the scrappy, tanking Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday night. Pittsburgh would have made the field just by winning its last two games, both against the baserunner. But they couldn’t, and the New York Islanders eliminated them by claiming the Eastern Conference’s final playoff spot on Wednesday with a win over the Montreal Canadiens. No team stays good forever in a salary cap sport, and Pittsburgh’s day was finally coming. But getting there this year required an all-time circus of mismanagement that squandered the last elite, healthy seasons of, for all we know, three future Hockey Hall of Famers. Adding to the geekiness, the man who messed up the team did such a comprehensive job that in the days Crosby, Malkin and Letang have left in Pittsburgh, recovery may be impossible. If you’re a Penguins fan (like me) or an appreciator of aging stars, you’ll see this as a crime against hockey. If you’re understandably sick of penguins, you’ll find it hilarious. But if you are someone, it’s a case study in how a front office can blow an opportunity from within.

To blame for ending the Penguins as a going concern is Ron Hextall, the franchise’s CEO through 2021. Hextall, a former goaltender and failed GM of the Philadelphia Flyers, was tasked with maintaining the Penguins after the team won three Stanley Cups between 2009 and 2017. The Penguins lost more playoff games than they won, but their consistency was shocking and a testament to how difficult it was not to make the playoffs when Crosby, Malkin and Letang were on the roster. In fact, before Hextalls was created this season, no manager had ever managed to accomplish that feat.

Hextall deserves credit for keeping Malkin and Letang last season, but those were futile moves. The Penguins have no farm system to speak of, thanks to a decade and a half of picking late in the opening rounds of the draft or not picking at all, instead trading future assets for short-term help. The only way for the Penguins, as long as they have had a trio of stars, is to try to win immediately and push from tomorrow to the day after tomorrow. Keeping Malkin and Letang on long contracts meant to generate lower salary cap space for a few years at the beginning was part of that plan. The Penguins made another good acquisition last offseason to keep winger Rickard Rakell, a do-it-all forward with 59 points.

Everything else the franchise has done over the past few years might as well have been designed in a lab to undermine these stars. They could teach about it in sports business seminars.

Hextall handed out appalling contracts in spades. Last summer, he gave winger Kasperi Kapanen a two-year deal worth $3.2 million a year, which he then waived midway through this season. The previous summer, he signed Brock McGinn, another winger waived by the Penguins this offseason, to a four-year, $2.75 million salary cap deal. One player he didn’t give up was veteran center Jeff Carter, whose contract he extended for two years at a $3.125 million cap hit midway through last season. The Penguins bottom two forward lines became arguably the worst in the league. Kapenen, McGinn and Carter played 163 minutes together this season and were 124th in the NHL.^th-best striker out of 127 in expected goal difference, according to analytics site MoneyPuck. However, no one was the team’s worst attacker. It was Mikael Granlund, the center Hextall acquired just weeks ago for a second-round pick on trade day. Granlund, who is signed to a $5 million cap hit next year, has one goal in 20 games for the Penguins. All knew it was a bad idea except Hextallthe only important person.

Hextall made a stunning mess of the league’s 2021 expansion draft, which welcomed the Seattle Kraken to the NHL. He didn’t seem ready to put forward Jared McCann on the Penguins’ protected list of players the expansion team couldn’t steal from him, so Hextall traded McCann for a potential opportunity and a seventh-round draft pick. McCann has scored 40 goals and 70 points this season in Seattle. (He was briefly a Toronto Maple Leaf before the Kraken swept him, so the Leafs let him go, too.) The Penguins also lost Brandon Tanev, a productive third- or fourth-line winger with 16 goals this year in Seattle. Indeed, the 56 goals the Penguins gave up to an expansion team while protecting the likes of Carter, Kapasen and recently traded fourth lineman Teddy Bleueger.

If that had been all, the penguins would have still been a playoff team this year. But it wasn’t. Hextall made a quarterback trade for the expensive and no-longer-great Jeff Petry after being fired a player who turned out to be not only younger and cheaper but better defenseman Mike Matheson. The GM did not trade the Penguins’ goaltending tandem of Tristan Jarry and Casey DeSmith, who have repeatedly let the team down this spring with a mix of ineffective play and injury. Neither was among the league’s better goaltenders.

If it all seems multi-faceted, that’s the point. No manager could so completely burn a team built around the still-excellent Crosby, Malkin and Letang just by making bad trades, dishing out bad contracts, being too lax at goaltending or doing expansion drafts. Hextall had to all of those things, some of them over several years, to get the Penguins to this point. It’s baffling that he’s still working, even though he probably won’t be for much longer. But that’s just a hunch, and it’s not entirely clear that Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC owner Fenway Sports Group, which recently bought the Penguinseven pay attention to their investments. Hextall isn’t the only one to blame for the Penguins’ demise. Brian Burke, the team’s director of hockey operations, whose actual job is questionable, deserves to be impeached, as is two-time Cup-winning head coach Mike Sullivan. The Penguins future moves should probably go deeper than Hextall, but singing fans should at least get what they want.

Crosby, Malkin and Letang can still defy gravity in 2023-2024. They are world class athletes. But they don’t get more runway as they approach their 40s. Their front office currently has over $8 million in cap hits for next year tied up for Granlund and Carter, who are effectively unplayable, and another $6 million added for Petry, who is no longer special. The Penguins are already spending up to the salary cap and have limited flexibility to add good players to next year’s team. Crosby, Malkin and Letang were never going to battle forever. The shock of the penguins’ decline is that the enemy that finally got them was not time. The invitation came from within house.