Max Lapierre looks better because he’s a good penalty killer and the Penguins are always killing penalties. — Sean Gentille (@seangentille) April 22, 2015

The Pittsburgh Penguins were defeated by the New York Rangers in overtime 2-1 in Game 4 of their first round matchup. Once again both teams exhibited stretches where they were the better team. Once again it was a one goal game. The series was definitely there for the taking for Pittsburgh, but highly unlikely now that they have a 3-1 deficit.Last night’s game, the series, and the Penguins future doesn’t need to be something people stress over figuring out. The answers are what they have always been, depth.Depth is winning out and that is usually how it goes in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.Pittsburgh is the victim of an insane amount of injuries on the back end and this has been fatal for their Stanley Cup aspirations. A lot of what Mike Johnston likes to do is predicated on the defensemen being a fourth forward. It is an approach that was highly successful when he had the horses on the back end to make it work. Johnston has changed his approach and he has made adjustments. Ultimately a chef is only as good as his ingredients and right now Mike Johnston has a lot of spoiled ingredients in his kitchen.The good news is that the ingredients that are spoiled are low cost and easily replaceable. The offseason plan is the same now as it was a month ago and same as it was last July.The Penguins have some great/good players, they need to keep them.The Penguins have some crumby depth players, lose them.Kevin Hayes’ winning goal for New York highlights the poor choices on the depth front and it was actually quite fitting. The players on the ice included Max Lapierre, Nick Spaling, Daniel Winnik, Ben Lovejoy, and Paul Martin. Each of these players is considered defensively responsible and/or provides a “veteran presence”.Max Lapierre has been getting a lot of positive attention in this series but he isn’t a new or better player because he is a “playoff player”.Lapierre gets full marks for his PK work because it has been really good, but at the end of the day he is still a bad player at even-strength hockey. He is just another player that fits the mold of “PK specialist”. Find “even-strength” specialists, the other stuff will sort itself out. Lapierre has a Score-Adjusted Fenwick against the Rangers of 39.43% which is even lower than his regular season numbers. All the yapping in the world doesn’t force the puck towards the other team’s goal.Daniel Winnik will be a victim of recency bias, but it is well earned. He has the worst Score-Adjusted Fenwick on the team right now in the playoffs at 24.67%(!). That is horrendous! The problem here isn’t that Winnik is a bad player, because he is not. He has an incredibly large sample size to draw from that says quite the opposite. The issue here is that he has had a poor series on a team that needed everybody to step up, especially a guy they traded a second round pick for. But there’s the big variable in all of this, the second round pick. As I have mentioned in the past you need to get ahead of the curve and be the team that signs a player like Daniel Winnik not waste assets trading for a guy like Daniel Winnik. The Penguins inability to target proper depth has resulted in them wasting more draft picks yet again. Awful series aside they need more bottom six help like Daniel Winnik. General Managers have a habit of getting into trouble when they overvalue the incredibly small sample sizes (both positive and negative) of the playoffs.Nick Spaling has been the best penalty killing forward for Pittsburgh in 2014-15. He plays pretty solid positional hockey. He also costs 2.2M. There is nothing about his game to justify that price tag. When you look back at getting value out of each of your players and wonder how the team got to the point of only dressing five defensemen you can point to this luxury contract for a fourth liner. Rumor has it that Jason Botterill was vocal about not wanting him included in the James Neal trade for exactly that reason.Pittsburgh traded away a young, skilled, and cost controlled defenseman who had off-ice issues for the reliability of a veteran player. Despres for Lovejoy stunk then and it stinks now. Even if moving out Despres was warranted there was nothing that was forcing the Penguins trade him at this year’s deadline and certainly not for Ben Lovejoy. What the Penguins have gotten in Lovejoy is a bottom pairing defenseman who is a mouthpiece to speak before and after games.Last but not least you have Paul Martin. Rutherford’s mismanagement neutered Martin’s ability to be the player he can be. Martin is not a #1 defenseman and he is in his mid-thirties. Playing him as the number one guy was forced upon the team because of injuries, but the inability to mange his minutes was because they only had five defensemen down the stretch. It murdered any chance Martin had to be the player he has been for years. He looks gassed and who could blame him? Martin will be moving on at the end of this year and it will be the right move for both sides, but he was a terrific Penguin.Then there is the goal scorer. Kevin Hayes, unrestricted free agent this past summer. Kevin Hayes who has been cost effective at 900k. Kevin Hayes who plays competent third line center for the Rangers. Kevin Hayes who has a Score-Adjusted Fenwick of 51.9% in his rookie year. Kevin Hayes who has 17 goals and 45 points in his rookie year. But hey, the Penguins extended Brandon Sutter so they’re all good at that spot.The series is not technically over at this point, but that overtime goal last night is a microcosm of why it is as close to being over as it is.The writing has been on the wall with Kris Letang, Olli Maatta, Christian Ehrhoff, and Derrick Pouliot out of the lineup. This Penguins season was never ending in a Stanley Cup. For those that had realistic expectations about the team and a clear understanding of why expectations should have been tempered you aren’t upset today, just disappointed.Those looking to take a nuclear bomb to the roster are irrational and don’t see the big picture. They will commonly point to the better players who are being paid the most and I get it, those players are an easy mark. But what isn’t taken into account is that most fans take for granted that the Penguins have this elite talent. The Penguins were gifted Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. The Penguins were supremely lucky to have Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr. This isn’t the norm even though it feels that way for Penguins fans. Chances are after the Crosby and Malkin era is over Pittsburgh will struggle for a while to find another player of that caliber, let alone two of them.The biggest key to remember is just because Crosby and Malkin are exiting their prime doesn’t mean they are exiting their window of excellence. Their prime is better than anybody else’s. Their twilight years are still going to be better than 90% of the league. Pavel Datsyuk is 36 years old. Does anybody believe for a second that Sidney Crosby and/or Evgeni Malkin are incapable of playing at a level like that in 8 years? Let me say that again, in eight(!) years. The window for Pittsburgh to be successful isn’t even close to being closed.The people looking to blow up the roster minimize the importance of depth moves and overpaying for average to below average players. They look at each individual depth move in a vacuum. Each mistake on the depth front is like a paper cut.That is until you have a thousand paper cuts and you start to bleed out. All the pieces matter even if on their own they seem insignificant. Building a competent Stanley Cup roster is an art form. General Managers are trying to paint a masterpiece. When you need a certain shade of a color, get that shade, don’t settle for an entirely different color.The only people that can close Pittsburgh’s window for success are the ones in charge of the personnel decisions. The pieces that are hardest to acquire Pittsburgh already have.The Penguins are not in cap trouble moving forward. Paul Martin and Christian Ehrhoff free up 9.0M on their own. Brandon Sutter is a very tradable 3.3M. Rob Scuderi could be bought out in an addition by subtraction roster move.Pittsburgh will have the appropriate resources to make the changes necessary. Will they?Thanks for reading!Follow me on twitter Follow @GunnerStaal