Prospects from Jake Guentzel trade are starting to get on a roll

It is a nice, positive development for the farm system and some good news for the Pittsburgh Penguins organization overall.

While things are not going the greatest at the NHL level for the Pittsburgh Penguins, there are some very real bright spots starting to emerge at the AHL level with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins.

Specifically with the development of the two main prospects in the Jake Guentzel trade, Vasily Ponomarev and Ville Koivunen.

Both players recorded hat tricks on Wednesday night in a 9-0 win over Hershey, with Koivunen taking the extra step of scoring a fourth goal in the win.

Here is the hat trick goal for Ponomarev.

It continued what has not only been an outstanding season for both prospects, but also a fantastic stretch of games since the start of January. During that 10-game stretch Ponomarev is up to 12 points for the Penguins, while Koivunen has 13 points (including two hat tricks).

That also includes eight points in his past three games.

Both players are also inching closer to a point-per-game mark for the season (Koivunen up to 35 points in 37 games, with Ponomarev up to 24 points in 28 games).

They have both been among Wilkes-Barre’s best, most productive prospects for the season.

It is an exciting and big development for the Penguins from a big picture outlook.

For one, it is certainly starting to put the Guentzel trade into a new light. It was easy to look at the return in the moment and feel just a little underwhelmed because they did not get a guaranteed first-round pick or any of Carolina’s highest rated prospects at the time. It seemed like a quantity over quality type of return. But sometimes immediate reactions are not always the best, and it is starting to look like maybe the Penguins extracted some really, really good value out of a rental player.

Perhaps they got managed to get some quantity and quality out of it.

Given that Koivunen and Ponomarev are just 22 and 21 years old respectively, they have provided a solid boost to a farm system that was in dire need of adding some sort of a prospect presence. And so far they have handled the AHL extremely well, especially in Koivunen’s case where he is playing his first full season of North American hockey (he did play 12 games for the Chicago Wolves in 2022-23, but this is his first real test here). That is a big jump, and it’s hard to be upset with how he is handling it.

The second-round pick they received in that trade, which turned out to be Harrison Brunicke with the No. 44 overall pick, has also added another solid prospect to the farm system.

With Michael Bunting giving the Penguins solid NHL production, and in turn giving them another trade chip, it’s hard to find much fault with the Guentzel trade in hindsight given his status as a rental.

I said this a couple of weeks ago, but when it comes to the Penguins’ shorter-term, NHL-level moves in the Kyle Dubas era there have been more misses than hits, which is a little bit of a concern. But when it comes to managing assets and the moves that are more geared toward a longer, bigger picture outlook, that is where he has really gotten the most value and done his best work.

The additions of Koivunen, Ponomarev, Brunicke, Rutger McGroarty and the Penguins’ other 2024 second-round pick, Tanner Howe, have added some serious depth to a prospect pool and farm system that was as shallow as any other team in the league when he took over. It is still not particularly deep, and they are still lacking a legitimate high-end, franchise-level player, but your farm system still needs to produce something.

The more players you can get coming through your pipeline, and the more players that give you some cost certainty for a few years when they reach the NHL, the more salary cap space your future team has to spend in other areas of need or in keeping other key contributors.

Even the Penguins’ Stanley Cup teams in 2016 and 2017 needed guys like Bryan Rust, Brian Dumoulin, Guentzel, Conor Sheary, Matt Murray and Tom Kuhnhackl to come along and contribute. Not many of them were consistently highly touted prospects the entire time.

Prospects can be tricky because they can literally turn out to be anything. Most of them are going to fail just based on the historical odds and percentages. Some of them won’t be as good as you think or hope they will be. And not all of the players from the aforementioned group are going to be quality NHL players. But if one or two of them emerge and stick long-term? That is a big win. The early returns are encouraging.