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Grading the last 10 Penguins drafts

June 26, 2025 by Pensburgh

2022 Upper Deck NHL Draft - Round One
Photo by Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images

It hasn’t been a pretty picture

The Pittsburgh Penguins have traded several key draft picks away in the last 10 years in their need to fuel a contender, which makes this focus a rough one. It’s tough to build from deep within the draft, most of the picks outside of the first round in the NHL are not going to go onto have NHL impacts. That said, let’s see how the Pens have done recently in the draft.

2024


Grade: Incomplete (but trending nicely enough)

You can never really know for sure with an NHL draft until several years have gone by to see what ends up happening. Last year looks pretty good for the Pens — or at least as good as a draft with no top-40 picks and only two picks inside the top-100 can look.

Harrison Brunicke was a rising star that even Central Scouting couldn’t keep up with. Brunicke rose from the 67th North American ranked skater in midseason to 52nd in the final, and heads were scratched when Kyle Dubas “reached” to take the defender 44th overall. Then everyone got to see Brunicke in action and the doubt was erased, he looks like he’s going to be a nice player.

Tanner Howe made Team Canada in his draft+1, usually a great sign. His ceiling might be that of a two-way, checking energy winger but he seems to be a good one. Troublingly, however, an ACL injury/rehab will eat up the majority of his draft+2 season next year.

As for the rest, we’ll see. Finn Harding was an overage pick that had a very nice season in the OHL as one of the top producing defensemen in that league. Being an older pick, he’s turned pro. He could be a diamond in the rough but has a long way to go, but at least has proven he’s a prospect worth keeping an eye on – which is about all you can ask for the 223rd overall pick one year after being drafted.

2023


Grade: Incomplete (and also trending nicely enough)

Kyle Dubas’s first draft in Pittsburgh was a lot like his second one mentioned above. Brayden Yager got flipped for Rutger McGroarty. Emil Pieniniemi imported to the OHL and performed well and is worth watching. Mikhail Ilyin was close to historically productive as a teenager in the KHL, and was able to sign an NHL contract already.

Looks promising when subbing McGroarty into the picture, but is going to require a longer-shot of Pieniniemi and/or Ilyin to develop into pro players. It has a chance to be pretty decent, which again is admirable considering the team had one top-90 pick and only three top-150’s. That’s making the most out of being dealt a bad hand with such little quality.

2022


Grade: C- (with time remaining to improve the grade)

This draft pretty much comes down to two players in Owen Pickering and Sergei Murashov. If either still has room for significant growth, the class looks manageable enough to get some contributions. If they don’t…Yikes.

Pickering did well to see action in 25 NHL games in his draft+3 at age 20/21, but there’s reason to believe he might not be much more impactful than a third pair player given a lack of dynamic skills and the difficulty to become a “defense only” type of quality blueliner. Murashov split time between the ECHL and AHL in his first year pro and impressed but as a goalie has a longer development runway to get up to NHL speed that will require more time to see just how far along he can make it.

2021


Grade: F (with a slight chance of improving)

Granted, there’s reason to look bad considering we’re working with trying to grade a class with zero top-50 picks and only one inside the top-150. There can’t be much expectation of it amounting to much when given those restrictions of only having one pick in the first four rounds.

So, yeah, good luck to Tristan Broz in salvaging this class. Broz will be 23 at the start of next season and scored 19 goals and 37 points in 59 AHL games. Nice enough (especially considering a mid-season battle with mono), but hardly a can’t miss NHL future awaits. Broz should at least be able to salvage the class somewhat and get one of them into the NHL, though Laatsch did sign his entry level contract after finishing college and will also try to “defense only” his way up the ranks in the next few years to come.

2020


Grade: D+ (with slight chance to increase)

Calle Clang served his purpose to be included in the 2022 trade that acquired Rickard Rakell. It was moving him at the right time, Clang’s had a meandering and unimpressive career ever since.

Joel Blomqvist has turned into a near NHL caliber goalie, and he’ll make or break this group. It remains confounding that the Penguins opted to draft two goalies with their only two top-100 picks, really stretching the limits of “best” player available considering that it takes goalies much longer generally to get to the NHL than their skater counterparts.

2019


Grade: D-

This draft was a huge missed opportunity, and that’s not meant on the Penguins so much as just the stalled developments of Sam Poulin and Nathan Legare can be looked back upon as a bummer. Serious what could have been vibes. It could have been adding two fairly impactful players but unfortunately never materialized.

Legare was seen in mock drafts as high as the first round, Pittsburgh moving up with a trade to snatch him in the third was seen as a tremendous value and great coup. Unfortunately, Legare couldn’t skate well and was unable to make himself an option in the neutral zone or advance play. But boy could he shoot the puck in juniors! (Ironically, in that trade where they moved down, Arizona picked Mattias Macelli who has gone onto score 130 points in 224 NHL games so far).

In many ways Poulin was similar to Legare; they were both out of Quebec, both kinda stocky/already developed into big 200+ pound frames at an early age, both with skating deficiencies and questions about how likely they would make it to their ceilings. Fast forward through the trials and tribulations and it didn’t much work out.

Puustinen creeped out as another overage success story, though to a modest degree. He could score at all the levels leading up to the NHL but didn’t quite have the size or pace to find a niche. But even getting 24 career points (and possibly more this season) out of a seventh round pick is far more than the median in that area.

2018


Grade: I don’t know, maybe a C?

At this point I’m not sure if we’re getting beaten down from not seeing too much success but somehow after all this time the 2018 draft could still have some surprises for the Pens. That is because Filip Hallander came back to the organization after heading back home to Sweden. Hallander was named forward of the year in a good league last year. Can he become any sort of difference maker above the AHL level in his second attempt now at age 25? We’ll see.

I thought Calen Addison was going to be a right shot Alex Goligoski and enjoy a nice long NHL career as a puck mover, but that didn’t quite work out that way. Addison got bumped to San Jose, had a bad year on a terrible team in 2023-24 and spent all of 2024-25 in the AHL. Hopefully his NHL days aren’t over but it’s not looking good.

2017


Grade: F (or a 0 if we’re being really stern but accurate)

For the first time since the team’s initial two-pick amateur draft in 1967, the Pens produced a draft class that has zero NHL games played. None at all. Might as well have stayed home.

Granted, they had two top-150 picks and none in the top-50, so that’s a risk that could catch up with a team to lack quality and it finally did here. Zach Lauzon’s career was derailed by concussions. Almost none of the others ever really got on track. Dreadful stuff.

It’s hindsight, but they might as well have traded that second and third round pick for something that could have helped the NHL club. The picks didn’t end up doing that.

2016


Grade: D+

Gustavsson, traded to Minnesota in the Jason Zucker deal, has emerged as their No. 1 goalie. He posted a .914 save% and a 31-19-6 record last season, both pretty impressive. So the team gets credit for drafting a 30+ win per season goalie but otherwise it was a bunch of nothing across the board with misses in the second and third rounds that stand out a little. It’s not always going to work out, but neither of those were even close.

2015


Grade: C-

On talent alone, Sprong deserves high marks. But he had enough baggage and problems to be unwanted professionally everywhere he went so what to make of that? Dominik Simon was a nice story to go from overage pick that was way off the NHL radar to eventually earning his way up to Sidney Crosby’s line but 22 goals in 256 games speaks to his skill limitation as a player.

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