A couple of different scenarios
The Penguins reportedly might want to go young next season, but realistically how young can the NHL’s oldest team from last year get?
The answer to that may come with just how aggressive the team gets when it comes to trading Erik Karlsson (now 35 years old) and Bryan Rust (33) and Rickard Rakell (32). Dealing any, most or even all of that group of players would make Pittsburgh younger.
Let’s take a crack at a couple of potential lineups for next season and see. Ages listed are for the time of opening night next October.
The “Kicking the can down the road” lineup
The premise of this lineup is a starting point for how the roster looks now, solely based on the ending point from 2024-25, veteran players aren’t pushed from the lineup. Such an outlook will only be accurate for a very limited time, obviously changes are coming. But this sets the baseline for the pre-roster surgery for the off-season wheeling and dealing to come. If no further moves are made, this will be the squad and at the least the Pens can get all the veterans one more year closer to seeing their contracts come to an end.
Ville Koivunen (22) – Sidney Crosby (38) – Bryan Rust (33)
Rutger McGroarty (21) – Evgeni Malkin (39) – Rickard Rakell (32)
Tommy Novak (28) – Kevin Hayes (33) – Phil Tomasino (24)
Danton Heinen (30) – Blake Lizotte (27) – Noel Acciari (33)
Conor Timmins (27) / Erik Karlsson (35)
Owen Pickering (21) / Kris Letang (38)
Ryan Graves (30) / Ryan Shea (28)
Tristan Jarry (30)
Alex Nedeljkovic (29)
Average age: 29.9*
The “Internal replacements” lineup
—This would be about as extreme a makeover as things could get, though certainly not intended to be predictive. The realism chances of this are low but this is a good base level to consider the youngest roster outlook plausible if all off-season decisions were strictly tailored around creating the youngest team possible. That means all of Rakell, Rust, Karlsson and Alex Nedeljkovic are gone right off the bat. Those trades could well bring back young players who are ready to beat out incumbents from within the organization.
Under this scenario the team comes to terms with a willingness to waive (and eating some dead cap space) on the veterans that can’t be kept as healthy scratches in the Kevin Hayes, Ryan Graves, Danton Heinen and Noel Acciari territory to further reduce the average age of the playing lineup. Such moves could be too ruthless for real world treatment of respected veterans (who might be necessary to get through the season, similar to the way Hayes stepped back in after nine-straight games of healthy scratches last season to help provide a warm, semi-capable body to round out the lineup for the rest of the year).
*Tracking websites will be more precise and include the months in the age to make this into an older figure, we only incorporated the years
Ville Koivunen (22) – Sidney Crosby (38) – Rutger McGroarty (21)
Tommy Novak (28) – Evgeni Malkin (39) – Phil Tomasino (24)
Fillip Hallander (25) – Tristan Broz (23) – Valtteri Puustinen (26)
Connor Dewar (25) – Blake Lizotte (27) – Sam Poulin (24)
Conor Timmins (27) / Kris Letang (38)
Owen Pickering (21) / Harrison Brunicke (19)
Vladislav Kolyachonok (24) / Ryan Shea (28)
Tristan Jarry (30)
Joel Blomqvist (23)
Average age: 26.6
This looks to be about as young as the Pens can get next season, with an average age inflated by the presence of the three elder statesmen of Crosby, Malkin and Letang (take the three out and the average age is 24.5 for the rest). In reality, of course this is TOO young. Brunicke probably isn’t playing 82 games in the NHL next season as a teenager, and the chances that there are zero other 30+ year old skaters on the Pens next year besides the core three is an impossibility. This outlook is certainly more hypothetical and informational than anything expected or realistic but fun nonetheless to wipe away all the old and see all of the new.
The “Splitting the difference” lineup
—Call the following a compromise lineup between the first two concepts listed. The Pens look to integrate a few young players into the NHL lineup right off the bat, but don’t completely purge 100% of their veterans out of the playing lineup at the season start. Maybe there’s a trade or two to thin the ranks and rebalance the team that badly needs more talent on the back-end (ala Rickard Rakell for a capable top-4 defenseman in this scenario) but overall it’s a mix of some young (Hallander, Pickering) and the old (Hayes, Acciari) while still finding a way to say “enough’s enough” and not find a place for Graves in the opening night lineup.
This would also be a world where an Erik Karlsson trade with two years remaining on his contract doesn’t exceed the value of keeping the player for a while longer yet.
Rutger McGroarty (21) – Sidney Crosby (38) – Bryan Rust (33)
Tommy Novak (28) – Evgeni Malkin (39) – Ville Koivunen (22)
Danton Heinen (30) – Kevin Hayes (33) – FREE AGENT
Filip Hallander (25) – Blake Lizotte (27) – Noel Acciari (33)
TRADE / Erik Karlsson (35)
TRADE / Kris Letang (38)
Owen Pickering (21) / Conor Timmins (27)
Tristan Jarry (30)
Alex Nedeljkovic (29)
Average Age: 29.9
The averages remain high, one gets the sense that the difference in being an old team or a younger team in a lot of ways comes down to how many of the Heinen/Hayes/Acciari 30+ types of bottom-six forwards that end up making the lineup versus how many younger replacements the team might be able to find to push these players out of the lineup (or roster altogether if they find trades or get ruthless enough to waive the veterans and stash them in the AHL ala Matt Nieto and Tristan Jarry last season).
—
The questions about how young the Penguins can get for next season revolves around the answers to how aggressive they will be about potentially dealing away veterans in any/all of Erik Karlsson, Rickard Rakell and Bryan Rust. Keeping one, two or all will again make Pittsburgh an old team, given the base of 35+ players in Crosby, Malkin and Letang. Dealing any of their vets — which will figure to bring back younger replacements, will angle the Pens towards getting younger.
From there, the question is how cutthroat the team will choose to be with their replacement-ish level players of Graves, Heinen, Acciari, Hayes and Nedeljkovic. Taking a tough stance could help get younger players like Pickering, Hallander, Broz and Blomqvist onto the NHL lineup. Those veterans could be given enough deference in hopes that some might be tradeable assets near the deadline if the team attempts to bide their time in a more patient manner, but if the team wants to get young that is the area where they need to aggressively look to remove the vets that finished up with them last season and focus on clearing the path for younger players that can ideally be developed by coach Dan Muse into something bigger than they are today.