Vasily Ponomarev does not immediately come to mind as the person best positioned to offer a diagnosis on the Pittsburgh Penguins’ 2024-25 campaign, which recently ended short of the playoffs for the third straight season.
Coach Mike Sullivan or one of the player mainstays who spent most, if not the entirety, of the year on the NHL roster, seem more appropriately stationed.
Yet, the 23-year-old forward, who played in the Penguins’ final three contests of the season following an end-of-year recall from the American Hockey League, offered his own thoughts on the club’s shortcomings, despite his brief front-row seat to all the action.
The issues he pinpointed over a handful of games tracked with areas of improvement that the Penguins failed to rectify over the course of the season.
“We have to manage the puck more and play more defensively if we want to play in the playoffs – and we actually want to play there,” Ponomarev said during the Penguins’ locker cleanout interviews April 18. “It hurts when you’re not making the playoffs.”
Despite expressing disappointment over not reaching the postseason at the NHL level, playoff hockey is nonetheless in Ponomarev’s immediate future, as shortly after the Penguins’ campaign concluded, he was reassigned to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, with whom he spent the majority of 2024-25.
Ponomarev was one of six players sent back down to the AHL to help Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in the Calder Cup playoffs, with the Penguins falling 5-2 Wednesday evening to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms to begin the best-of-three first-round series, setting up an elimination game Friday.
Under first-year coach Kirk MacDonald, the Penguins finished fourth in the Atlantic Division with a 40-24-7 record and 88 points.
Now, for Ponomarev and teammates such as Ville Koivunen, Tristan Broz, Owen Pickering, Harrison Brunicke and Joel Blomqvist, the work has begun on competing for a championship.
“To play as far as possible,” Ponomarev said of his postseason goals. “I think you have to grind and I hope we’ll make the Calder Cup this year. I think it goes from game to game and that’s how you build confidence. Some teams are playing really good earlier in the year and then at the end of the season, because they are losing more, they are losing their confidence.
“I think in Wilkes, the team is building up more confidence right now with the games that we’ve played. That’s really good for us.”
Ponomarev got his feet wet in the NHL this season, appearing in seven total games spread out over three recalls from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
In them, he assumed a bottom-six role, scoring no points while mainly skating as fourth-line center and averaging 10 minutes, 2 seconds of nightly ice time.
However, the fruits of another year of development for Ponomarev, a 5-foot-10 left-handed shot, were more detectable in the AHL.
Playing in 55 games for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Ponomarev scored 15 goals with 26 assists.
While overall inferior to his career-best AHL campaign of 46 points with the Chicago Wolves (affiliate of the Carolina Hurricanes) in 2022-23, Ponomarev was still pleased with the regular season he put together with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.
“I’m really happy with it, how I grew up a little bit as a player,” Ponomarev said. “Maybe not a little bit, because I didn’t play this system before. This year was a good learning year to learn something new from hockey and hockey life.”
Ponomarev has now spent just over a year in the Penguins organization after being part of Carolina’s trade return package sent to Pittsburgh for Jake Guentzel.
It might be fair to say that in the eyes of Penguins management, Koivunen and fellow winger Rutger McGroarty stole the show at the end of the season as the most NHL-ready prospects ready to get underway in Pittsburgh.
But the development of Ponomarev, a restricted free agent at the conclusion of this season, has not gone unnoticed.
“I think that he’s grown a ton,” Penguins assistant general manager and manager of minor league operations Amanda Kessel said in early April. “I think in the beginning of the year, some of his – coming from a different organization and playing lots of man-on-man – the (defensive) zone was at times a bit challenging.
“But he’s responded super well. He’s come up with huge goals for (Wilkes-Barre/Scranton), his two-way game is really developing and he’s somebody who gives it everything he has every single night.”