It’s been just two months since the Pittsburgh Penguins announced Kyle Dubas as their new president of hockey operations. But even with only the early days of his black-and-gold tenure in the books, the former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager has already had a seismic impact on his new club.
Rewind back to the day of that early-June announcement, and the once-powerhouse Pens were a group out of sorts — fresh off missing the playoffs for the first time in nearly two decades, saddled with ill-fated contracts signed by the previous regime, looking on track for another middling campaign if major surgery wasn’t carried out on the roster.
In came Dubas, he himself coming off a tense, awkwardly public split from the Maple Leafs that opened the door for a move south. The Penguins’ owners, Fenway Sports Group, paid handsomely to lure the oft-discussed manager to Pennsylvania, inking him to a seven-year, $35-million deal. Seventy days into his tenure, Dubas may have already made good on their bet.
The decision that will likely define the Dubas Era in Pittsburgh came last week, when the Penguins engineered a complex, three-team deal to land reigning Norris Trophy winner Erik Karlsson. But past that one signature move, Dubas — who officially took over as general manager earlier this month too, after serving as acting GM since June — has had plenty of swings elsewhere on the roster, too.
Here’s a closer look at how his vision for the organization has played out so far.
OFFENSIVE UPGRADES
Dubas made his first big splash a month into the new role, going out and acquiring Reilly Smith from the recently crowned Stanley Cup champs. It was a sign of the type of decisions to come, the new front-office architect managing to fill the club’s lone top-six hole — left by departing UFA Jason Zucker — with someone carrying a lower cap hit, fresh off a title run and who’s arguably an offensive upgrade on the scorer he’s replacing.
Expected to line up alongside Evgeni Malkin on the second line, Smith seemed the perfect complement to a top six that saw Malkin and Sidney Crosby turn back the clock with their best seasons in half a decade, while Jake Guentzel, Rickard Rakell and Bryan Rust all chipped in with strong campaigns as well.
It was in the bottom six that Dubas applied his vision more widely, though.
“I think number one is we need to add talent to the forward group,” Dubas had said of his new team’s roster after his first few weeks in Pittsburgh. “Last year, the group here got great performances out of its core players and still missed [the playoffs]. So we need to have players at the bottom of the lineup, the third and fourth lines, that can add certain utilities — talent being some, penalty-killing being others, speed, youth.”
In came two new centres: Lars Eller signed to serve as the club’s new 3C behind Crosby and Malkin; Noel Acciari brought in likely to line up in the middle behind him. The Penguins need no introduction to the former, having had plenty of battles with Eller during his near-decade in Washington — though no longer the offensive threat he was in those days, the veteran still brings enough creativity, and a strong enough two-way game, to be an upgrade in the spot he’ll fill. The hard-nosed Acciari, meanwhile — who Dubas brought to Toronto in February, too — should bring some relentless energy to the fourth line, and has enough skill with the puck on his stick to chip in offensively, too.
The former Toronto manager brought another former Leaf to town as well, in Andreas Johnsson, and filled out that bottom-six group with Matt Nieto and Rem Pitlick. All told, only Jeff Carter and Drew O’Connor remain from the clubs’ 2022-23 bottom-six group, the other four spots likely to be filled by new faces.
POTENTIAL LINES:
Jake Guentzel – Sidney Crosby – Rickard Rakell
Reilly Smith – Evgeni Malkin – Bryan Rust
Matt Nieto – Lars Eller – Jeff Carter
Drew O’Connor – Noel Acciari – Rem Pitlick
REVAMPED BLUE LINE
The most significant addition Dubas made to his club’s attack, of course, didn’t come up front, but on the back end. Much like his arrival in Toronto, which preceded the high-profile signing of John Tavares, Dubas capped off his first summer south with a blockbuster swing for Karlsson.
And it was, no doubt, a shrewd move for these Penguins. Forget his age, forget the injury history, forget the price tag — No. 65 is undeniably one of the greatest creators of offence from the blue line in the history of the game. And for all the faults he’s shown in recent years, the 33-year-old’s coming off the most prolific season of his career, a season in which he outscored every member of the Penguins roster.
There’s risk attached, as always with a move of this magnitude, but given where the club’s been mired for the past half-decade, given the fact that they’re clearly all-in on winning until the day Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin hang up the dream, bringing in Karlsson seems a worthwhile gamble — what the club managed to do within the deal that brought him to Pittsburgh made it even more worthwhile, but we’ll get to that later.
“I basically feel like we have two No. 1 defencemen now,” head coach Mike Sullivan said after the deal, via Penguins beat writer Josh Yohe. “Erik is going to add an element to our game (transition offence) where we were already pretty good. He’s going to take it to an entirely different level. To have Erik and Kris Letang on our blue line, to me, it just changes the entire dynamic of our hockey team. These guys are so unique, so special.
“One of these two guys is going to be on the ice for the majority of the games. They both have that rare ability to log huge minutes of ice time. So, when we were talking about the potential of this trade happening, it’s exciting for me just talking about all the possibilities that we’ll be able to utilize with these guys.”
Karlsson will impact every aspect of the Pens’ attack, but it’s on the power play that his dynamic skill will be felt most potently.
Since the Landsboro, Sweden, native entered the NHL, no defender has amassed more points on the man-advantage than Karlsson’s 273. Last season, he was still producing with the game’s best in that regard, finishing with the 10th-most power-play points among all NHL defenders. Now, the Penguins have the chance to send over the boards a deadly top unit featuring Karlsson, Letang — who collected the fourth-most power-play goals among all NHL defencemen last season — along with Crosby, Malkin and Guentzel.
It was an upgrade sorely needed. The last time the Penguins’ power play truly dominated was also the last time Crosby and Malkin had another marquee scorer to work with: Phil Kessel, who essentially ran the unit from the left circle. The sniper breathed much-needed life into Pittsburgh’s man-advantage attack during his time in the city, finishing top five league-wide in power-play scoring in three of his four years with the club, leading the league in that category during his third year with the team, and bringing team success with him — over Kessel’s four-year Penguins tenure as a whole, the club’s power play ranked No. 1 in the league.
Since the three-time champ’s departure, the black-and-gold’s top unit hasn’t been nearly as prolific. A change of approach, of personnel was needed. In Karlsson, Dubas delivered perhaps the best possible solution.
Still, much like his moves up front, Dubas’s retooling of his new club’s blue line went beyond one marquee acquisition. Before adding Karlsson, the new manager made another key move on the back end, bringing in Colorado Avalanche and New Jersey Devils standout Ryan Graves to serve as the new top-pairing partner for Letang.
What that top-left role was going to look like this season was a key question mark for the club, with Brian Dumoulin — a top-pairing mainstay who’s been the team’s second-most important defenceman for the better part of the past decade — hitting free agency. A change seemed to be needed, the stakes high, and until Karlsson was thrown into the mix, Graves seemed the club’s most impactful add this off-season. Simply put, the 28-year-old brings everything the team’s blue line needed more of — size, steadiness, and the type of straightforward defensive poise required to balance out the creativity that Letang and Karlsson will bring to the table.
Behind that blue line is the one decision Dubas has made so far that’s drawn less praise from the Penguins faithful — that of re-signing Tristan Jarry to a weighty five-year deal carrying a $5.38-million cap hit. On one hand, the 28-year-old has yet to prove he can lead Pittsburgh back to where they want to be, Jarry continually looking unsteady in the post-season despite glimpses of regular-season brilliance.
On the other hand, there wasn’t an obvious upgrade available in free agency, and with the club clearly holding its trade capital for a Karlsson move, they had few options.
Dubas did opt to shake up the Jarry-DeSmith tandem that the team’s run with for the past few seasons, trading away DeSmith and replacing him with 2021 Calder Trophy finalist Alex Nedeljkovic as the club’s new backup.
POTENTIAL LINES
Ryan Graves – Kris Letang
Marcus Pettersson – Erik Karlsson
P.O. Joseph – Chad Ruhwedel
Tristan Jarry
Alex Nedeljkovic
ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION
Even with the addition of a 100-point, Norris Trophy talent in Karlsson, even with the adds dotted throughout the rest of the roster, the most impressive aspect of Dubas’s tenure in Pittsburgh so far might not be what he brought in, but what he removed.
Coming into a Penguins organization that was at the low point of its current era — mired in mediocrity, fresh off a 2023 trade deadline that made matters worse, and a rock-bottom playoff miss for the team’s veteran core — the list of issues was lengthy. But, the thinking went, the club was saddled with too many questionable contracts to find its way back, to navigate through the needed fixes.
And yet, somehow, Dubas and Co. managed to solve a number of those issues in one fell swoop. In a shrewd bit of management, the Penguins used the opportunity for a complex blockbuster deal to not only bring in a Hall-of-Fame talent, but also to move out anchor contracts and clear cap space. Out went Mikael Granlund — Hextall’s ill-fated last-straw deadline add — and his exorbitant $5-million cap hit. Out went Jeff Petry and Jan Rutta, two more Hextall swings from last summer who simply never panned out in black and gold.
The three-team deal managed to make the Penguins younger, faster and more skilled — and cleared $3 million in cap space.
It was a vision unfamiliar to Penguins fans, who watched last March as the team’s former GM took to the podium post-deadline and lamented the hard-cap realities that shaped his club’s underwhelming trade deadline, and ultimately underwhelming season.
“Cap constraints are limiting for a lot of teams — the moves now are so much more complex than they were 10 years ago,” Hextall said then. “You know, with a third-team broker, and keeping salary — it’s a complex world out there, with LTIR. … It’s a different world, very complex, and you try to do the best you can do with the constraints that we all have.”
The previous regime’s inability to navigate that new world set the Penguins back in the aftermath of their championship runs. In Dubas, it appears the club has found a manager well-versed in the language of today’s game, equipped to try and pull them back into the league’s elite.
Whether it’s enough to carry the veteran Pens back to Stanley Cup glory remains to be seen. But however close they get, there’s no question the team has a better shot with the group Dubas has assembled over the past 70 days than the one that closed out a dismal 2022-23 campaign.
