Dubas’s Opportunity Knocks; Penguins Goals for this Weekend

Kyle Dubas has remade the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Yet the task to rebuild the team and organization that had won the second back-to-back Stanley Cups eight years ago is just beginning. Dubas has built up the analytics department, scouting department, and has already been able to effect significant roster changeover.

And therein lies Dubas’s next task. While the roster has flipped from the mishmashed, disjointed calamity of disappointment and failure that ended the previous regime, Dubas is merely into the first steps of the great journey of rebirth toward what he hopes will be a long-term championship contender. Again.

In a perfect world, the Penguins would close their laptops Friday night having selected a top-six center and a top-pairing defenseman, or perhaps a pair of top-six centers who could soon carry the torch brightly lit by Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.

Of course, there are not two players available in the draft who will come close to the careers set by Crosby and Malkin, but a team doesn’t necessarily need all-time greats down the middle to win. Just ask the vanquished Edmonton Oilers, the victorious Florida Panthers, Tampa Bay Lightning, and St. Louis Blues, who all carried varying levels of top-six centers.

Dubas’s opportunity is not merely a pair of first-round picks Friday, then a second, and three third-rounders beginning on Saturday. The draft picks are merely the starting line for Dubas and the potential transformation.

No, this is Dubas’s chance to shove the Penguins into the next phase, perhaps by shoving some players out the door. It’s the chance to begin the great overhaul at which he’s otherwise methodically nibbled.

That is not to invite a fire sale but a forced changing of the guard. Assuming Sidney Crosby is on board with the great changeover, he stays. Perhaps Bryan Rust is the other pillar, the sentry at the door, who understands and conveys what is necessary for the new generation of Penguins players.

Otherwise, Dubas has an opportunity over the next 48 hours, but extending into July, to get to bedrock and thus turn rebuild from inching toward the bottom to finally racing forward.

Within a few days, maybe a few weeks, the Penguins organization can stop fearing what comes next and start looking to the future. Dubas will need to make some hard choices and unpopular ones, but anger and angst pass. The negative emotions fade, and the social media tantrums subside when the negative is replaced with direction and hope.

Dubas may not be able to get it all done this summer. Surely, he would like to because the sooner he gets to bedrock and truly begins building, the sooner he reaches his goals. After all, he essentially wasted his first season trying to salvage the scraps of a winner and then was handcuffed in Season Two with a bad combination of his mistakes from the first season and the previous regime’s bad decisions.

Hindsight is 20/20, but that term is now antithetical to the mission. Dubas now has a chance to look forward and force the organization and fanbase to look forward.

Prepare for Landing

As part of that turn, the Penguins need to move on from Erik Karlsson. The view from this keyboard is that rumors hitting the national media, which posited that Dubas was holding Karlsson looking for value in a deal, are posturing. As the market is Charmin soft for other defensemen, including Bo Byram, no reports have credibly linked Karlsson to a pursuer, even to an interested party.

That’s where things stand after what could be categorized as a disastrous 2024-25 season for Karlsson, whose statistics belied the sometimes painful eye tests. Whether it was injury or frustration rotting into disinterest, Karlsson did little to raise his value and become sought after by contenders.

Rickard Rakell is the sad sacrifice to rebuilding. Typically, a player coming off a career year on a dirt-cheap contract who can make your star centers better is a definite keeper. Instead, Rakell is the necessary trade that Dubas needs to execute. To put it bluntly, what we’ve already opined in long-form, Rakell makes the Penguins better, but not good enough.

Trading Rakell is a necessary step backward so the team does not get ensnared in the mushy middle. The accompanying returns–even if they fall short of the three-asset trade package we expected at the NHL trade deadline in March–will only serve to add fuel to the turnaround.

Dubas has other trade chips, such as dangling defenseman Owen Pickering in a swap of prospects like he executed in the Rutger McGroarty for Brayden Yager deal, but the primary chip remains Bryan Rust.

A Rust trade might feel like a kick in the stomach to fans and even those in the locker room. Dubas could loudly signal many things with such a deal, though there are benefits to avoiding it. It might hurt, and it might even cause Dubas pause to do so, but things have to change in order for things to change. If Dubas can’t find deals for the others, Rust might find himself an unwilling sacrifice upon the altar of rebuilding.

This weekend is the start. It could be the launch or at least the countdown of changes. To keep the rocket theme going, the one thing the next few weeks cannot be is an aborted mission.