Penguins Pass on Laine Opportunity; Looking at Why

The Montreal Canadiens not only traded for Patrik Laine on Monday, but they also snagged the Columbus Blue Jackets’ valuable second-round pick in the process. It cost them a nice young defenseman, Jordan Harris, who is not without potential but whose ceiling is probably on a third-pairing and was losing his spot in the Canadiens lineup.

So, why didn’t the Pittsburgh Penguins make a play for Laine, who has a 40-goal season on his resume and one of the best shots in the NHL?

As several readers were quick to cite, the Penguins currently lack the salary cap space to accept all of Laine’s $8.7 million salary cap hit. New Columbus president of hockey operations/GM Don Waddell said removing Laine’s full cap hit for the next two seasons was paramount in the trade talks, which existed around the league for well over a month.

According to Puckpedia, the Penguins currently have about $2 million in cap space when cut down to 13 forwards (and Matt Nieto is placed on long-term injured reserve).

The NHL player assistance program only recently cleared Laine, but he had signaled his desire, and Columbus had given permission to speak with other teams long before then. So, his availability was no secret.

However, Penguins president of hockey operations/GM Kyle Dubas could have easily set aside the cap space to make a run at Laine. Until the Penguins’ trade for Cody Glass and the Nashville Predators third-round pick last week, the Penguins cap structure was only a few manageable tweaks from being able to do so.

So, the “Penguins couldn’t because of salary cap space” argument isn’t the reason the Penguins didn’t make a play. They chose Glass and Nashville’s third. They chose Kevin Hayes and St. Louis’s second-round pick, later becoming St. Louis’s 2026 second-rounder and Ottawa’s 2025 third-rounder.

The scales show the Penguins earned three draft picks, one second and two third-rounders, for taking Hayes and Glass. Laine would have netted them only one second-round selection.

Also, of note, there are multiple paths by which the Penguins could have been in a position to accept all of Laine’s $8.7 million AAV, even after the Hayes trade, but those would involve trading away veteran players.

Dubas proved himself to be a creative GM last summer when he shuffled the cards like a Las Vegas magician to acquire Erik Karlsson.

More than a few observers, analysts, and writers, including this one, believed Laine would have been an adrenaline shot to the Penguins lineup, helped the power play, and gone a long way toward filling the void left by the Jake Guentzel trade, which currently remains only partially filled only by Michael Bunting.

Colleague Marc Dumont ran the numbers, and even with the difficulties and injuries of the last few years in Columbus, Laine was still scoring at a first-line rate, which figures to be a healthy addition to the Montreal Canadiens.

So, the short answer to all of the above would be the Penguins weren’t interested or not interested enough.

OK, that’s fair.

But why?

We will ask the major question that is awash in nuance without a definitive conclusion. Did Dubas believe Laine would improve the Penguins but not so much as to make them a contender, thus hampering the rebuild that is running concurrent to the present roster?

Or did Dubas just not want the $8.7 million gamble? The Columbus second-round pick could well be first-round adjacent as the 33rd or 34th pick next summer. Just as Dubas was willing to jettison the St. Louis Blues’ 2025 second-round pick, which is projected to be a top-40 pick, for later picks, we can surmise Dubas is not desperately trying for a quick flip.

Perhaps Laine would have pushed the Penguins to run afoul of Dubas’s stated goal of “not just squeak into the playoffs” because the Penguins’ lineup with Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin feeding Laine would surely seem to be a playoff team, though not one capable of winning the Stanley Cup.

By accepting lesser-talented salary dumps and passing on potentially high-end players in the same situation, Dubas seems to be setting up for his own lottery pick and top-40 selection in the second without the destructive chaos of overtly cleaning house.

It would seem we’re all in for a new era, not only in Penguins hockey but also in Penguins intentions.