A Decade of Traded Penguins Draft Picks; Silver Wins & BIG Mistakes

It might come as a surprise, but from 2009 through 2012, when the Pittsburgh Penguins were chasing or winning championships, they had four first-round picks.

That was the smart play by former general manager Ray Shero, but execution is everything.

They badly missed on three of those four, selecting the likes of Joe Morrow, who played only 162 NHL games for three teams over an unremarkable 17-year professional career, and Derrick Pouliot, who scraped together 226 NHL games with seven teams over 13 years.

After Jim Rutherford replaced Shero as the Penguins’ GM in 2014, first-round draft picks became little more than trade fodder as Rutherford successfully chased a Stanley Cup roster, then unsuccessfully chased fortifying it.

From 2013 through 2024, a span of three GMs, the Penguins had just four first-round picks. Kasperi Kapanen (2014), who was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs a year later in the Phil Kessel deal. Sam Poulin in 2019, Owen Pickering in 2022, and Brayden Yager in 2023.

Rutherford left in January 2021, eventually leading to Ron Hextall’s two-year tenure as GM. Rutherford traded the 2021 pick as part of the package for Jason Zucker, so the mere two-year term meant Hextall was the only of the three GMs in the last 11 years to not trade a first-rounder. He made the only selection available to him in 2022 (Pickering) before being summarily dismissed after ther 2023 season.

So, what happened to all of those first-round picks? A group of flopped trades, painful missed picks, two Stanley Cups, and a shocking tragedy is what the Penguins have left to show for aggressively trading most of their selections.

Subjectively, if each trade were rated as a win, loss, or tie, the Penguins would be 2-5-1 or 2-4-2, pending your view of missing out on drafting Nic Hague or Connor Timmins in 2017, but only one of the wins was significant.

The big success was acquiring Phil Kessel, a significant part of two Stanley Cups. Does that make all of the trades worth it? Or does missing out on the talented likes of Matthew Barzal and K’Andre Miller undo the good tidings? The wins were extreme, and so, too, were the losses.

Traded Penguins Draft Picks

2013

Trade acquisition: Jarome Iginla from the Calgary Flames.
Draft Pick (No.28): Morgan Klimchuk.
Potential Pick: Jason Dickinson

Iginla’s Penguins tenure began with Stanley Cup expectations and ended with playing on his off wing and an ignominious sweep in the Eastern Conference Final by the Boston Bruins.

Klimchuk played five professional seasons and just one NHL game with the Calgary Flames. Dickinson is still a valuable bottom-six center with the Chicago Blackhawks. Dickinson was taken with the 29th pick and has played 502 NHL games.

2015

Trade Acquisition: David Perron from the Edmonton Oilers
Draft Pick (No. 16): Mathew Barzal
Potential Pick: A handful of NHLers also followed, beginning with Kyle Connor, Thomas Chabot, Joel Eriksson-Ek, Brock Boeser, and Travis Konecny. The pitfall was Evgeny Svechnikov at No. 19, who never quite stuck in the NHL.

The trade became a calamity instead of a draft that could have bolstered the franchise for a decade. Barzal would have been a game changer, and at worst, the team would have almost assuredly had immediate and long-lasting help at one of several positions. The rub is that Perron was having an awful season with Edmonton (5-14-19 in 38 games), and didn’t do much better with the Penguins, scoring just 22 points (12-10-22) in 43 games in 2014-15. Then he was off to another bad season under coach Mike Johnston, registering just 16 points, with just four goals and a brutal minus-13 rating in the first 43 games of 2015-16.

Perron’s collapse was part of the greater problem. The roster had become a down-stuffed effigy of itself until Johnston was fired and Mike Sullivan was hired in December. Perron was traded in January for Carl Hagelin.

2016

Trade Acquisition: Phil Kessel from the Toronto Maple Leafs
Draft Pick (No. 30): Sam Steel
Potential Pick: Jordan Kyrou was taken 35th, but Steel was the best of the immediate picks.

Sometimes, you get it right. The Penguins gave up Kapanen and their first, as well as swapping a gaggle of minor leaguers on both sides for Kessel. As bad as the 2015 trade was, the 2016 trade was fireworks, parades, and two Stanley Cups.

2017

Trade Acquisition: Ryan Reaves and the 31st pick to St. Louis for Oskar Sundqvist and the 51st pick
Draft Pick (No. 31): Klim Kostin
Potential Pick: Conor Timmins, Nic Hague

Rutherford plainly stated he was tired of seeing his team get beaten up. The Penguins won the second of their back-to-back Cups in 2017, but they did so under a heavy physical barrage. Rutherford got himself a sheriff of frontier justice.

The trade didn’t pan out well for either side. Sundqvist has stuck around in the NHL as a bottom-six center and is in his second stint with St. Louis. Reaves averaged his customary five minutes per game with the Penguins but didn’t really fit the speedy forecheck system. He was part of the complex and ill-dated trade for Derick Brassard at the 2018 trade deadline.

However, the 51st pick the Penguins acquired was for first-round talent Zachary Lauzon, but bad luck struck the team and, more so, the player. Lauzon suffered a serious concussion in junior hockey, and after a comeback attempt, he was forced to retire. The Penguins’ 2017 draft class stands as the worst class in team history, as none of the six picks played a game in the NHL, and few stuck in the AHL for any length of time, either.

2018

Trade Acquisition: Derick Brassard from the Ottawa Senators
Draft Pick (No. 22): K’Andre Miller

Another ouchy. A real kick in the stomach, then the head. Not only was the Brassard trade an abysmal failure as the player refused to accept his limited third-line center role and Sullivan stubbornly refusal to make him a top-six scoring winger. Instead of the rousing success projected after the complex trade initially rejected by the NHL Central Office because it violated the salary cap (and made the league’s head spin), the downfall of the Penguins dynasty began and they missed out on a young defenseman who could still be with them.

The end of a Stanley Cup run, a miserable player, and no pick. Otherwise, it was all good.

It’s a toss-up if the 2018 debacle was as bad or worse than the whoopsie in 2015. It should have worked but instead became hockey’s version of an Aesop fable.

2020

Trade Acquisition: Kasperi Kapanen from the Toronto Maple Leafs
Draft Pick (No. 16): Rodion Amirov
Potential Picks: Kaiden Guhle, Dawson Mercer

The first trade involving Kapanen was a rousing success. However, bringing him back was an epic failure. Kapanen never captured the rich potential of a speedy power forward that the Penguins envisioned, and after a couple of years, the team surrendered, waiving him where the St. Louis Blues claimed him.

Unfortunately, tragedy surrounded the draft pick. Doctors diagnosed Amirov with brain cancer not long after his selection and he passed away in 2023 when he was just 21 years old. Dubas selected the talented Russian player over a couple of future NHLers immediately behind him. Sadly, we’ll never know if it was the right pick but we know the trade was a mistake.

Other GMs also complained about the trade as they would have offered more for the Penguins draft pick, but Rutherford jumped forward while the bubbled Stanley Cup playoffs were in full swing. Count this one as a big L.

2021

Trade Acquisition: Jason Zucker from the Minnesota Wild
Draft Pick (No. 26): Carson Lambos
Potential Pick: Zachary L’Heureux

The Penguins won this trade, though it was not necessarily the rousing win the Rutherford envisioned. Zucker was a fine complement of speed and energy on Evgeni Malkin’s wing, though he struggled with injury and lower-than-expected offensive totals during his Penguins tenure.

L’Heureux is one of the few young Nashville players the Penguins did not acquire last season (Cody Glass, Philip Tomasino, Tommy Novak)

2024

Trade Acquisition: Erik Karlsson from the San Jose Sharks
Draft Pick (No. 14): Konsta Helenius

The ’24 wound might be a little too fresh, especially as frustration grows with Karlsson. Dubas wasted little time in the time-honored Penguins tradition of wadding up the top draft pick and tossing it away in exchange for the shiny new toy that will bring happiness.

Dubas is now scouring the market for centers and defensemen to bolster the woeful organizational depth, and the Finnish Helenius had a solid first season in North America. The center registered 35 points in 65 games.

It’s too soon for a verdict for any of the picks around No. 14, but given the Penguins’ situation, a center in that spot looks more like a canteen of water in the middle of the desert.