Penguins Losing the Free Agent WAR

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.