…Or, one could say that it has already begun
About a year ago at this time it was clear the Penguins were going to be in a lengthy process to rebuild/retool/re-whatever you want to call it in their quest to build the team back up.
Usually one thinks of a team like this as what Chicago is — extremely green and young players learning and growing together. That hasn’t really been the case in Pittsburgh. The Pens are an older team – Elite Prospects had their average age at 29.5 and the fourth oldest in the league.
A team in the NHL can’t decide to turn to youth and have young players instantly start coming out like water from a faucet. The process to acquire and then wait on youngsters to get started can take a while.
GM Kyle Dubas and the Pens did look to take steps to speed up the process. One such move involved trading 2023 first round pick Brayden Yager to Winnipeg for their 2022 first rounder Rutger McGroarty. McGroarty played in the AHL and NHL last season, Yager was back in juniors. Similarly, Dubas sought a return for Jake Guentzel that was more focused on young players, namely Ville Koivunen, instead of prioritizing a first round pick that would have taken more time to develop.
Here’s something we wrote last year about the team’s core and age shakeups:
Five Core players: Crosby (37), Malkin (38), Letang (37), Karlsson (34), Bryan Rust (32)
—These guys are old! But still the backbone of the team.
Also under contract: Lars Eller (35), Reilly Smith (33), Noel Acciari (32), Rickard Rakell (31), Matt Nieto (31), Michael Bunting (29), Marcus Pettersson (28), Tristan Jarry (28), Ryan Graves (28), Drew O’Connor (26)
—This will be the area to watch for the Pens in a youth quest and where GM Kyle Dubas can work some magic to get younger. Can a player like Smith be shed? Do they look to bury a player like Nieto in the AHL in favor of a younger option? What could even be done abut Jarry or Graves? This list includes some established and good performers (Bunting, Pettersson and Rakell) but also carries a lot of questions to be answered about how to shape the team.
Youth: Valtteri Puustinen (25), Jesse Puljujarvi (25), Emil Bemstrom (25), P.O. Joseph (25), Jack St. Ivany (25), John Ludvig (24)
It’s no accident that out of the mid-tier and mid-level players only a few (Noel Acciari, Rickard Rakell, Tristan Jarry, Ryan Graves) are still with the organization and under contract for next season. Those with enough value to be traded (Eller, Smith, Bunting, Pettersson, O’Connor) were all moved along. That is how a team gets younger.
It is also interesting that every single one of the players in the “youth” category just last year have distanced themselves from future prospects of having a huge role with the NHL team in Pittsburgh. It’s a reminder that circumstances and outlooks can change very quickly for the non-elite type of prospects and young players — not all will pan out and make it and sometimes careers can have very brief peaks in the ultra-competitive world of the NHL.
We ended up last year with the following:
The real test might be the next wave in the 1-2 years to come with future crop of prospects in Yager, Blomqvist, Owen Pickering, Tristan Broz and ones added in the Jake Guentzel trade like Ponomarev and Ville Koivunen. If that group can make it up the ranks in the future, that will be the avenue to turn the team over as the Crosby/Malkin days fade away.
It’s no fun going through tough seasons but we might have already seen the next wave in the final days of last season. McGroarty looked great down the stretch before his season ended with a broken foot. Koivunen was even more productive and showed an immense amount of progress. Pickering played 25 NHL games this season. Harrison Brunicke came from relative obscurity as a second round pick and has already been pushing for NHL games as a teenager. The Pens have a ton more draft picks to use in the future where they’ll attempt to find even more young talent.
Dubas’s offseason decisions will set the course of how much or little youth the Pens will have next season. After all, if the team decides to pick up veterans like Kevin Hayes in exchange for more draft picks, that leaves less space for a Vasily Ponomarev or Tristan Broz to have a spot in the lineup. Pittsburgh management has routinely said they will let the younger players dictate when they are ready to move up to the NHL level, but to a degree it’s all a numbers game. Find a way to move Hayes and/or Acciari this off-season or early into next year (similar to how Lars Eller was sent out) and the team is going to be a lot younger on average. Add more veterans this summer and then it will remain old.
So while it won’t be an immediate sea change to suddenly become a young team, especially with so many core players who are 35+ and under contract, Pittsburgh can and will be gradually shifting into their next era by loading up with new and inexperienced players. That process is already well under way. As the years tick by and contracts to veterans draw one more year closer to expiring the team is also working on building up their system so that a player like Joel Blomqvist or Sergei Murashov can take over when a veteran goalie is traded or sees a contract expire. That evolution is the natural process of time moving ahead and it will be a key in the months and years ahead for the Pens.