Penguins’ big question: Did Kyle Dubas do enough to get Pittsburgh back into the playoffs?
After the Pittsburgh Penguins offered Kyle Dubas a job as the organization’s first president of hockey operations, there were plenty of reasons for him to accept.
Pittsburgh, for one, is geographically closer to Southern Ontario than you’d probably guess. The title was right. The responsibilities were, too. The salary, one could only assume, was competitive. And the core, old and wounded as it might’ve been in the wake of its first missed postseason since the George W. Bush administration, revolved around three still-productive future Hockey Hall of Famers — and, in their coach, a possible fourth.
“The way I view it is that if people want to bet against Mike Sullivan, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and others, they can go ahead and do so — but I’m gonna bet on them and go with them,” Dubas said on June 1.
He talked that day about “(supplementing) the greatness that those people bring each day.”
“The top end of the forward group, I think, is very, very good,” he said. “You look throughout the league, and to have that group that’s there, in whatever formation you want to place it on that night, is going to be good.”
In the months that followed, Dubas backed up his talk. At the draft, he added a well-balanced, offense-first, middle-six piece in winger Reilly Smith. In the early days of free agency, he revamped Pittsburgh’s bottom six, which Ron Hextall had shuffled, tweaked and downgraded into a true Achilles’ heel, by adding a handful of capable bodies with actual defensive value. He retained starter Tristan Jarry, ensuring that the Penguins wouldn’t be left standing up when the music stopped in the summer’s round of Goaltender Musical Chairs.
Then, in August, he pulled his coup de grâce, adding the defending Norris Trophy winner — and one of the few game-breaking offensive talents capable of giving Pittsburgh the help it’d require to start a new playoff streak — in Erik Karlsson. Also, Dubas moved out some problem contracts in the process. It was, in a word, wild.
The end result is a team on relatively firm ground headed into the season. They’re projected to finish the season with 96 or 97 points — the 14th-highest total in the league, eighth in the Eastern Conference and fourth in the Metropolitan Division. They’re far from a playoff lock (not that anyone’s a lock at this point in the calendar), but a 64 percent chance is better than a coin flip, too. Their odds of advancing in one way or another: 36 percent. Their odds of winning the Stanley Cup: not zero.
Maybe the best indicator of the quality of Dubas’ work — and the closest thing we can get to a definitive answer to our question here in late September — is what Pittsburgh’s projected point total would’ve been had he not made quick work of his summer reset; bringing back the same lineup would’ve dropped their preseason projection to 87 points. That’d put them down with the Buffalo Sabres who, despite a fleet of young, fascinating offensive talent, have a 21 percent chance of making the playoffs.
That team might be a year away; the Penguins would’ve been two years gone. Instead, Dubas went out and found 10 points’ worth of value up and down the lineup. Some of that was boring; adding defense-only players like Lars Eller, Noel Acciari and Matt Nieto to the bottom six isn’t going to win Dubas any awards, but all three are projected to be better than the average player at their spots in the lineup, and all three have defined skill sets that the Penguins’ bottom six lacked last season.
Eller, for example, is still effective on puck retrievals, based on All Three Zones data. He stays back, fishes pucks out and effectively flips the ice. It’s boring work, and on plenty of teams, Eller wouldn’t have represented an upgrade anywhere in the lineup. In Pittsburgh, though, he’s on track to open the season as a third-line center, and he’s a whole lot better than what they had last season. It’s been said a dozen different ways over the last year or so, but this was still a franchise that somehow wasted 93- and 83-point seasons from its top two centers. You don’t get there by having competent role players.
Ryan Graves, who’ll start the season to Letang’s left on the top defensive pair, is also a sneaky upgrade. Dubas signed the 28-year-old to replace Brian Dumoulin, who’d aged out of a first-pair role over the previous two seasons. On some level, it’s an overpay — signing most players through 2029 would be — but Graves makes plenty of sense. In New Jersey, he ate tough minutes alongside offensively slanted partners, and he has the sort of traits (a huge reach, solid skating) that made Dumoulin a fit for Letang for so many years. For 2023-24, he projects to have a plus-1 Net Rating. Dumoulin, after a few rough years, is at minus-6. Those are the kinds of swaps that get you 10 projected extra standings points.
Of course, the easiest way to get there is to add a defenseman whose projected Offensive Rating for next season is second league-wide to Cale Makar. Are Karlsson’s defensive impacts ugly? Absolutely. But for now, he’s the definitive Dubas Penguin: old, exciting and worth the risk. The alternative was staring at Crosby, Malkin and Letang and running out the clock. Instead, Dubas did as he said. He bet on them, and he gave them a chance.
