As the NHL’s March 8 trade deadline approaches, a few obvious moves beckon for Kyle Dubas, the Penguins’ president of hockey ops/GM.
Trade winger Jake Guentzel.
It will be a shame to see him go, but Guentzel is a free agent at season’s end. He can’t be allowed to walk and bring nothing in return. As the winger du jour at this year’s deadline, he should fetch a first-round pick, a top prospect and something else. His departure also creates salary cap space.
Trade winger Reilly Smith.
He’s been pining for a return to Vegas since the Golden Knights swapped him in the wake of last season’s Stanley Cup victory, never fitting in with the Penguins’ dressing room and playing rotten hockey. Vegas has created cap space via injuries, most notably by placing Jack Eichel on long-term injured reserve. The Golden Knights could handle Smith’s $5 million cap number and would see his return as a boost.
But for Dubas to truly make the most of the deadline and set the wheels in motion for a Penguins revival, he needs to think outside the box.
The Penguins should consider trading goaltender Tristan Jarry.
Jarry is playing great, justifying the five-year, $26.875 million contract he signed this past offseason. He leads the NHL in shutouts with six, is seventh in goals-against average at 2.46 and eighth in save percentage at .916. He’s sheared off some rough edges and been consistent.
But that performance creates value, and several teams who fancy themselves Stanley Cup contenders lack a true No. 1 goalie: Carolina, Colorado, Edmonton, New Jersey and Toronto, for example. (A few of those teams are fooling themselves, by the way.)
Jarry might bring as much in a trade as Guentzel, maybe more.
Edmonton might particularly covet Jarry. His goaltending helped the Edmonton Oil Kings win the Memorial Cup in 2014. That’s Canada’s national championship for major junior hockey. (That isn’t relevant to now, but hockey spins a unique web.)
The Penguins have desperately few legit prospects in their system, but they have one at goaltender.
Joel Blomqvist, 22, was the Penguins’ second-round draft pick in 2020. He’s having an excellent rookie season in the American Hockey League with the Penguins’ Wilkes-Barre/Scranton farm team. His goals-against average is 2.17, fourth in the AHL. His save percentage of .919 ranks seventh. Blomqvist played in the AHL’s All-Star Classic.
The Penguins’ developmental arm is reportedly high on Blomqvist, considering his skill set elite and his demeanor ideal. He’s got reasonable size at 6-foot-2, 187 pounds.
When will Blomqvist be ready for the NHL? Not sure, but it shouldn’t be too long. The Penguins could patchwork at goal till then. It’s not hard to find mediocre goalies.
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Maybe re-up Alex Nedeljkovic, who is doing fine on a one-year, $1.5 million deal. (If his price doesn’t go up too much. Creating cap space and making the goalie position cheap is an immediate benefit of trading Jarry.)
This isn’t an easy decision. Jarry is performing well. But his value will never be higher, and it’s only one good year. Finally, at 28. Jarry has never won a playoff series. Giving Jarry a new deal is something the Penguins hesitated doing. He’s decent, but he’s not Ken Dryden.
Dubas could lay a lot of legit groundwork for moving forward with the return achieved for Guentzel and Jarry. (Ditching Smith is more addition by subtraction.)
Dubas wants the Penguins to get younger. That won’t magically happen. Nor will the Penguins mysteriously just start being good again.
Trading Jarry and relying on Blomqvist to follow through on his development is risky. But it’s an educated, logical risk and gets parts moving. Dubas needs to get parts moving.