Mark Madden's Hot Take: The Penguins don't need another Nick Bonino

Just before NHL free agency hit Friday, another radio personality tweeted the Pittsburgh Penguins needed a “third-line center. Cut from the (Nick) Bonino cloth.”

Bonino spent two seasons in Pittsburgh. The Penguins won the Stanley Cup in both.

But Bonino wasn’t “that guy” until he joined the Penguins and hasn’t been since.

Reputations get created by circumstance. They don’t come ready-made.

Bonino is perhaps marginally better than Brandon Sutter, whom the Penguins traded to get Bonino. But the Penguins won with Bonino. With Sutter, they didn’t.

In 2016, Bonino had 18 points in 24 playoff games. He also had 16 points in his last 13 regular-season games.

Before that, Bonino had 13 points in his first 50 games as a Penguin. He seemed a bust.

That red-hot 37-game streak is what’s remembered. Carl Hagelin, Bonino and Phil Kessel: the HBK line, replete with T-shirts. The overtime winner to eliminate Washington. The legendary call of that goal on the Punjabi version of “Hockey Night in Canada.”

That’s the cloth from which you want to cut.

But besides those 37 games, Bonino has been mostly average in his other 687 NHL games. If the Penguins don’t hoist those two Stanley Cups, his time in Pittsburgh is forgotten. Like Sutter’s.

But because of those Cups, Bonino is remembered. Winning does that.

The Penguins don’t need a Xerox of Bonino. They need to replicate the circumstances that resulted in Bonino’s Pittsburgh tenure being romanticized. If that happens, perhaps Mark Jankowski is the next Bonino.

But that ship has sailed. It may have sunk.

By the way, I never did get a dime from those HBK T-shirts. Neither did Shawn Michaels.