What sort of job is he doing here? It has been a very mixed bag.
The Pittsburgh Penguins decision to place starting goalie Tristan Jarry on waivers yesterday has restarted the discussion on the job Kyle Dubas has done in his first two years running the team.
Mostly because that was one of the first moves he made.
At the time, it seemed like a huge risk to invest that many years and that much money into a goalie that has not always been reliable, and had never fully established himself as a consistent starter that a team could rely on.
There were also limited options outside of him.
But was there anybody else seriously considering him at a price that was even remotely close to that? I have my doubts. And even if there were, sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand.
Either way, it was a risky move and not even two years later it looks like a complete disaster of a contract that is either going to result in the Penguins trying to carry around — or bury — a $5 million salary cap number for a player that is not particularly good, or carry around a dead cap number for even more years following what will probably be an inevitable buyout.
It was one of his first moves, and it kind of set the tone for what would go onto be a pretty underwhelming first year.
Just as a refresher — here are the main moves from that initial offseason.
- Signed Tristan Jarry to a five-year, $26.8 million contract
- Signed Ryan Graves to a six-year, $27 million contract
- Traded a third-round pick for Reilly Smith with two years and a $5 million per year salary cap hit
- Traded for Erik Karlsson with four years and with a $10 million per year salary cap number
- Signed Noel Acciari to a three-year, $6 million contract
- Signed Matt Nieto to a two-year, $1.9 million contract
- Signed Lars Eller to a two-year, $4.9 million contract
- Signed Alex Nedeljkovic to a one-year, $1.5 million contract
That is a lot of roster movement in one offseason. That is eight players. That is 35 percent of an NHL roster, with seven of them added on multi-year deals.
The return on those investments has been …. spotty.
At best.
Jarry has already been waived. Eller and Smith have already been traded.
Graves has found himself as a healthy scratch and a third-pairing defender on a bad defensive team.
Accairi and Nieto do not cost a ton, but they are not particularly good, even as fourth-liners and penalty killers. Neither should guaranteed lineup spots on any night.
Nedeljkovic ended up being the Penguins’ best goalie a year ago, but that was not really saying much. He is back on a two-year deal and has been just as bad, if not worse, than Jarry has been.
Karlsson has been productive and had his moments, but he has not really been what anybody expected.
The three biggest investments there — in terms of years, money and assets spent — are obviously Jarry, Graves and Karlsson. The Jarry and Graves moves have simply been colossal failures, as they represent $10 million in cap space over five years to players that have quite literally proven themselves to be unplayable in less than two years. It’s been bad, and no matter what your expectations for the team are in the short-term — win or rebuild — it’s a massive issue to have that much dead weight on your books, while also bringing serious questions into the NHL-level scouting and decision-making.
I am not as hard on the Karlsson situation as others are. I respect the swing for a big-time player. I respect still trying to take another run at something when you still had high-end players. The contract is ugly, but they mostly traded a lot of ugly contracts. The salary cap situation the past two years is actually better with Karlsson than it would have been without the trade given who and what they gave up. I can’t be mad at the effort. It was a proven, Hall of Fame level player coming off an historically great season. I’d make that trade again.
Smith and Eller are where things get a little more interesting, and take me to something somebody said to me on Twitter on Wednesday — the moves that Dubas has made with an eye toward the future seem to be stronger than the moves made with an eye toward winning right now.
Smith did not work out here in Pittsburgh. But the Penguins only traded a third-round pick for him with two years remaining on his deal. They ended up flipping him (with only one year remaining on his deal) for a future second-round pick (2027) and a fifth-round pick (2025). Getting a second and a fifth for a guy you only gave up a third to acquire is a long-term net win.
Eller was easily the best of the free agent signings from a year ago. They gave up nothing to get him, and then flipped him for a similar trade package: a future third-round pick (2027) and a fifth-round pick (2025).
That is another long-term win.
In hindsight, the Jake Guentzel trade was probably good value for a rental. It was disappointing to not get a first-round pick back for him when so many other teams did manage to get that for their rentals, but they did bring in a couple of promising prospects and a relatively high second-round pick. If Carolina had made the Stanley Cup Final and sent the Penguins a first-round pick as part of that trade, it would have been No. 31 or No. 32. They ended up with No. 44. The difference between those two picks from a value standpoint is not THAT different. They also ended up with a very good NHL player in Michael Bunting who has his own trade value and could easily be flipped at some point before next year’s trade deadline.
This past offseason’s move following a similar script.
The free agent additions are, from a win-now perspective, mostly underwhelming. But they are at least short-term, low-risk deals.
But even the Kevin Hayes trade might work out from a long-term outlook. They ended up getting a future second-round pick for the purposes of taking on his contract. It might end up being a high second-round pick. If Hayes keeps scoring goals, they might even be able to flip him again and get another future pick back in return.
Similar story with Cody Glass. He’s not particularly good, but they again added two future draft picks (including a third-round pick in 2026) by simply taking on his contract and moving out Jordan Frasca.
Now, collecting a bunch of mid-round draft picks probably is not going to move the needle much on your rebuild. Those are essentially lottery tickets that have a higher failure rate than success rate. But they are future assets, and if you have a lot of them they can be used in different ways. The fourth-round pick they got at the deadline last year for Chad Ruhwedel, for example, was flipped for Philip Tomasino.
I think it really does largely boil down to this: When it comes to flipping assets, making trades and trying to piece together a long-term outlook, I do think there are more positives there than negatives. The Penguins have come out ahead on a lot of the trade moves, even if players like Smith and Karlsson did not/have not worked out as planned.
That is important for where the Penguins are right now and where they need to go in the near future.
But when it comes to making long-term investments in free agency, NHL-level scouting and building out a roster with depth pieces and goaltending, things have quickly unraveled. That is concerning, because even if the Penguins are not contending right now the hope is that they will in not-too-distant future. And if they are getting those types of moves wrong now, why should we assume they will get them right in the future? Especially when those were some of the blind spots of the front office in Toronto for so many years.