I’ve noticed several other Penguins sites have assigned grades or conducted polls to evaluate the team’s moves this summer. As always, you folks are more than welcome to share your opinions (thumbs up, down or otherwise) in the Comments section of our articles.
You pretty much know my thoughts already. Taken as a collective along with the Kevin Hayes trade, I think our key free-agent signings are a HUGE red flag. More to the point, a clear indication that POHO/GM Kyle Dubas has thrown in the towel on trying to ice a competitive team, instead weakening us on purpose in order to expedite a (dreaded) rebuild. With the coming season (and our Core Four ) offered up as sacrificial lambs.
Need a recent example? Take a good, hard look at the 2021-22 Blackhawks, who finished 28-42-12 despite the presence of franchise icons Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews and 40-goal man Alex DeBrincat.
That’s what we can reasonably expect.
Or worse.
As for those new acquisitions? As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I decided to let the JFresh WAR charts, along with his comments, do the talking.
Read ‘em and weep. Indeed, there’s a whole lot of red (bad) on those charts and not a whole lot of blue (good). Anthony Beauvillier’s chart is particularly awful…filled with enough red ink to make a CPA commit hari-kari.
I do like the Blake Lizotte signing. He’s a feisty, forechecking ball of energy. But 1-for-5 puts us right at the Mendoza Line (batting .200).
It’s going to be a looooong summer and season.
Kevin Hayes, acquired by PIT, is a veteran pass first centre. Not a fast skater, not physical, not a forechecker. Put up decent play driving numbers with the Blues last year but didn’t do much with the puck.
Matt Grzelcyk, signed 1x$2.8M by PIT, is a puck-moving defenceman. Very active in transition. Once an analytical darling and has a 65% goal share at 5v5 in the past three seasons, but ice time is down and is a frequent playoff scratch. There are tools, but it’s a reclamation.
Anthony Beauvillier, signed 1x$1.3M by PIT, is an offensive depth winger. His value comes from creating scoring chances for himself, with the main issue being that he has a lot of problems putting them into the net.
Sebastian Aho (the Swedish one), signed 2x$0.8M by PIT, is a third pairing defenceman who has put up pretty inconsistent results. Draws a lot more penalties than he takes.
Blake Lizotte, signed 2x$1.9M by PIT, is a bottom six defensive forechecking winger and penalty killer with some passing ability.
Hey Rick,
You already know my thoughts, Dubas et al really screwed up in FA signings so far this year. As I wrote a couple of weeks back, the only FAs I wanted our Pens to target were Zadorov, Pesce, and DeBrusk. The only player I wanted to acquire in trade was Chychrun.
So far almost move this team has made stoked any embers of interest let alone excitement. The FA signings were abysmal. The bulk of the draft was……well weak.
The only things that the team has done that hasn’t bored me to tears has been
1. Trading Smith (good move but nothing really exciting – not like JR swapping Scuderi for Daley)
2. Drafting Tanner Howe
3. That which I just saw, Sergei Murashov, that Russian Goalie that I was almost convinced would never see North America has been invited to the team’s development camp that is about to start.
The thought of Blomqvist and Murashov manning the Penguins net is the only thing that I can see that will cause me to see a glimmer of hope!
Now if the team can find a way of getting Tankov and Mikhail over here so I can actually see them skating in real time and not in videos.
For those of you viewing on Facebook, I forgot Blake Lizotte in my original post. Duh.
He’s since been added.
Rick