Judging solely by points accrued and end-of-year conference standings, the Pittsburgh Penguins regressed in Year 2 of Kyle Dubas’ tenure as general manager and president of hockey operations.
The Penguins, who missed the playoffs for the third straight season, finished 2024-25 with 80 points, 11 shy of the final Eastern Conference wild-card club, the Montreal Canadiens.
They placed 13th in the East, as compared to one season ago, when they finished 10th with 88 points, missing the postseason by only three points.
That said, Dubas’ 30,000-foot view of the Penguins is more optimistic than a calendar year ago.
“I think that even now, when I look today — maybe we had less points than we had last year, but I feel like we’re slightly better positioned as we move ahead because of the younger players here,” Dubas said Monday in Cranberry while meeting with reporters for an end-of-season availability.
In particular, Dubas has ample reason to be excited about forwards Ville Koivunen and Rutger McGroarty, both of whom ended this season with the Penguins after solid campaigns in the American Hockey League with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
Koivunen and McGroarty, both of whom are 21, handled themselves well over a combined 13 end-of-season NHL contests following being called up from the AHL.
Both were given top-six deployments alongside franchise pillars Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, with McGroarty managing three points in five games and Koivunen chipping in seven assists in eight games.
Fellow forwards Sam Poulin, the Penguins’ first-round draft pick in 2019, and Vasily Ponomarev, acquired along with Koivunen in the Jake Guentzel trade (March, 2024), also earned end-of-year recalls to Pittsburgh.
While their NHL experience was brief, Koivunen and McGroarty both offered evidence that they can be difference-makers for the Penguins as the club seeks a return to Stanley Cup contention.
Poulin and Ponomarev may not have dazzled to the extent of Koivunen and McGroarty, but they will nonetheless represent youthful options hoping to continue developing their games looking ahead to next season.
While their strengths, roles and ceilings as NHLers may vary, all four players should be expected to enter preseason training camp in September with a shot to crack the roster.
“The forward group, some of the guys came up here at the end of the year and I thought performed well,” Dubas said. “They have a long way to go. We’ll continue to push them there.”
Dubas also threw Tristan Broz into the bag of forwards he anticipates competing for roster spots next preseason.
Broz, 22, managed 19 goals and 18 assists in 59 games for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, but had his first AHL campaign derailed by over a month because of a case of mononucleosis.
“We could have probably brought him up last week, but we just didn’t think that those types of games should be his first recalls into the NHL,” Dubas said. “… Best to have him stay down in Wilkes and come up next year where we can guarantee him a legitimate opportunity.”
Defensively, Dubas singled out a handful of players he’s considering as potential reinforcements on the blue line, Owen Pickering chief among them.
The 21-year-old left-handed shot, Pittsburgh’s first-round draft pick in 2022, played 25 NHL contests this season between mid-November and late January.
By his fourth NHL contest Nov. 23, Pickering had been boosted to the Penguins’ top defensive pairing alongside Kris Letang.
Pickering showcased promise as well as growing pains and at the end of January, he was reassigned to the AHL, spending the remainder of the season with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
“He’s got to have a real strong playoff here for Wilkes-Barre and he’s got to have a great summer,” Dubas said. “We can’t have him the same as (when) we had him go down, settling into a 12-13-minute-a-night role. He needs to come in and push his way into 17-18-19-20 minutes and earn that.”
Dubas also mentioned 18-year-old Harrison Brunicke, a right-shooting defenseman whose selection in the second round of last year’s NHL Draft came via a pick Dubas nabbed from Carolina in the Guentzel deal.
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Brunicke turned heads during the preseason but was ultimately returned to his junior club, the Kamloops Blazers of the Western Hockey League, in early October.
Brunicke went on to join Wilkes-Barre/Scranton at the end of March, making his pro hockey debut while “playing very well” through 10 appearances, in Dubas’ eyes.
The final internal defensive option Dubas hopes will compete next preseason is Jack St. Ivany, who was limited to 37 AHL games this season due to injuries.
St. Ivany, 25, was unable to maintain the momentum he appeared to craft at the end of 2023-24, when he made his NHL debut and helped the Penguins make a determined but doomed postseason push.
Still, Dubas has not given up on him.
“We would expect Jack to push, for sure,” Dubas said.
On top of the forwards and defensemen, Dubas also specifically said that young goalies Joel Blomqvist (23) and Sergei Murashov (21) will be given a chance to compete with Tristan Jarry and Alex Nedeljkovic next preseason.
Whereas Jarry and Nedeljkovic both are officially in the offseason, Blomqvist is gearing up for the Calder Cup playoffs while Murashov is currently with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL, hoping to aid a run through the Kelly Cup playoffs.
On the surface, the performance of the Penguins suggests they are drifting further away from Stanley Cup contention, with the club having finished with less points than the season before in three consecutive campaigns.
However, for Dubas, up-and-coming players at every position could, as early as 2025-26, begin to be part of the solution to the Penguins’s problems.
“I’m more optimistic going into next year than I was organizationally,” Dubas said. “… I feel we’re closer to where we want to get back to now than last year.”