2024 Draft Recap: Pittsburgh Penguins
2024 Draft Recap: Pittsburgh Penguins
Baby Steps were taken toward improving the quality of the farm system while eliminating a critical shortage of right-shot defenders
NASHVILLE (The Draft Analyst) — Those familiar with my work know how I feel about draft report cards, even if I’ve been guilty of feeding that beast throughout the last 10 years. But my thoughts on the latest 2024 results will be more than broad brush strokes, as pinning the rose on 12 uninterrupted months of in-depth analysis from both the team and prospect standpoints requires more than the standard letter-grade marking scheme acting as the rubric. Rather, draft hauls will be evaluated and labeled on the following criteria, which I think are both fair and reasonable:
Strong — Any four of potential franchise player(s) drafted; needs addressed; first-round caliber picks in the second or third round; multiple home-run swings in later rounds; point-producing sleepers; the majority of prospects were in top-line/top-pairing/starter roles (Ex. Buffalo’s 2022 draft)
Above-average - Any three of needs addressed; multiple home-run swings; acknowledged consensus favorites; the majority of prospects were in top-line/top-pairing/starter roles; making more with less; first-round quality in the second or third round. (Ex. Carolina’s 2023 draft)
Average — A solid first- or second-round pick but mostly unspectacular thereafter (Ex. Colorado’s 2020 draft)
Below-average — Quantity over quality; over-drafting of higher-round picks/reaching; four picks or less with no first-round selection; obsession with overagers (Ex. New York Rangers’ 2018 draft or Ottawa’s drafts from 2021-2023)
Poor — Any three of unpopular reach in the first round, no picks in the first or second round; needs not addressed, obsession with overagers, leaving upside on the board for projects, or bucking popular consensus choices (Ex. Arizona’s 2020 draft)
Outlook
They say starting at the beginning is always a good place to start, which apparently is the way ahead for the Pittsburgh Penguins since Kyle Dubas took over as team president and general manager two summers ago. But the strings attached to this particular roster re-tool or revamping may as well be secured by a Gordian knot of personal loyalties and mandates from the men who pay his salary, as Dubas’ apparent solution to missing the playoffs in his first season with the organization is to replace last year’s underperforming veterans with new underperforming veterans.
Adding draft capital from outside the first round would brief a lot better had Dubas earned a reputation for hitting with picks outside the first round, which between 2018 and 2023 saw only two of his choices – defenseman Sean Durzi in 2018 and winger Matt Knies in 2021 – develop into full-time NHL players.
The whispers that circulate the Penguins no longer have to do as much with the salary cap or even the health of their critical contributors. Rather, the talk around the Steel City concerns actual rebuilding, which for a growing minority should be conducted in a blow-it-up manner, which is exactly what happens when you go six years without winning a playoff series and miss the dance altogether in two straight. This is a perceptibly discernible crisis point for sure, one that was inconceivable in 2017 after all-star captain Sidney Crosby hoisted his third Stanley Cup months before his 30th birthday.
This is why the Duality of Dubas — the overthinking and the subsequent over-thanking, or vice versa — remains inherent in all of his press briefings just as he did in Toronto before a surprisingly patient and borderline protective media. That certainly won’t be the case in a tough blue-collar city like Pittsburgh, where multiple championships across multiple sports have been won and lost but without their top executives delivering exhaustive levels of cliches and platitudes when things don’t work out.
To be fair, Dubas did inherit a sinking ship that lacked the necessary strength to steer itself toward a tenable situation. Perhaps that is why the young GM is more willing to discuss rebuilding, acquiring draft assets, and set the conditions for well-trained prospects to replaced aging and expensive veterans. The 2024 draft was but a small patch for Dubas to use to plug one of his many leaks, and the lack of a first-round pick as a non-playoff team exponentially slimmed Pittsburgh’s chances at finding the cornerstone pieces it desperately needs to keep pace with the rest of the Eastern Conference.
MORE: 2024 NHL Draft Report (PDF Download)
Traded picks
One of the bigger trades from the weekend involved the Penguins, but the requisite backstory is going to bury that lede, which you probably expected nonetheless.
Instead, it’s probably best to shift our initial focus toward the Pittsburgh scouting staff, who as part of a perennial contender are all too familiar with inactivity on the first day of the draft. In fact, no team has drafted fewer first-round picks in the last 10 years than the Penguins, and the second iteration of the Kyle Dubas Era was going to be no different than what they experienced under previous regimes. In case you forgot, it was just last summer when Dubas dealt his 2024 first-rounder to the San Jose Sharks in the package for 100-point defenseman Erik Karlsson, thereby preventing the organization from acquiring back-to-back top-15 picks for the first time since taking Sidney Crosby first overall and Jordan Staal at No. 2 in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
Of course, this sub-optimal void presented Dubas with the opportunity to engage in his usual draft-day dealings that were so prevalent during the first six drafts of his general manager career, often practicing the Pittsburghian method of relinquishing first-round picks either for help at the trade deadline or at the draft for salary-cap relief (see Patrick Marleau in 2020 and Petr Mrazek in 2023).
But before we get into this year’s event, it wouldn’t hurt to recall two prominent trade examples involving Dubas from his Maple Leafs years — one from opposite sides of the yea-or-nay spectrum. In 2020, Dubas made a seemingly prudent move by sending picks at 152 and 211 (the latter from St. Louis via a 2019 draft-day trade that delivered stud goalie prospect Vadim Zherenko to the Blues) to the Florida Panthers for No. 136 so Dubas could select blogosphere-favorite Dmitry Ovchinnikov. Most important, however, is that the Panthers would use the 211th selection to take potential No. 1 goalie Devon Levi, who the Cats wound up shipping to the Buffalo Sabres as the centerpiece to the Sam Reinhart trade. To be fair, Toronto under current GM Brad Treliving would move Ovchinnikov to Minnesota for serviceable winger Connor Dewar, and nobody truly knows if the Leafs would have drafted Zherenko or Levi with either of the picks they moved. But one can’t ignore how incredibly unlucky the Maple Leaf franchise has been as a whole, let alone in securing strong goalies.
On the flip side, it appears as though Dubas’ decision in 2022 to trade down — something he tends to do more than trade up — is steadily working in Toronto’s favor, albeit for an entirely different regime. It was at the 2022 draft when Dubas took the 79th pick and moved it to the Vegas Golden Knights (who took two-way center Jordan Gustafsson) for No.s 95 and 135, which the Leafs used to respectively draft impressive wingers Nick Moldenhauer and Nikita Grebyonkin, each of whom should be considered two of Toronto’s 10 best prospects.
Neither move at press time is particularly needle-moving within the context of assessing the virtues and vices of a given GM, but it still shows that Dubas is willing to assume risk in any round, to include the first. Obviously, his Penguin situation in mid-to-late June was far different than anything he dealt with in Toronto, which never missed the playoffs under his watch and were never as alternately depressing and world-beating as the Penguins have been in each of these last two playoff-less campaigns. As chaotic as the scene surrounding the Maple Leafs can be due to their own unique and borderline-historic playoff ineptitude, their reality is that of a powerhouse regular-season outfit with a halfway-decent pipeline and a prime all-star core who guides the Leafs to a secured playoff berth well before the clock strikes midnight.
Yes, both franchises have been flustered to the point where job security is limited to only a handful of untouchables. But the Penguins are in a serious bind, and Dubas already had to eat crow at his end-of-season press conference for not putting together a playoff-caliber team in a season where a division rival with a -37 goal differential grabbed the final wild card berth. Being on the precipice of an even bigger disaster is what should be concerning Dubas more than anything, which probably explains why he made a headline-grabbing trade early into Day 2 by taking on the $3.75 million cap hit of St. Louis Blues center Kevin Hayes and a 2025 second-round pick for future considerations. I mean, talk about duality.
This move is unique in that the Penguins acted like a contender and a rebuilder all in one trade. Only bottom-feeders agree to take on salary by convincing the seller to pony up a second-round pick, which could be in the 40s if the Blues miss the playoffs for a third consecutive season. Conversely, the Penguins added a fairly prominent name to potentially center the third line behind Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and potentially help a power play that was among the league’s worst in 2024 and likely cost them a playoff spot more than anything else. Hayes at 32 is no spring chicken and his career-low 29 points (only five on the power play) in 79 games clearly indicates a player chugging forward towards retirement. On paper, the second-round pick is the only thing Penguins fans should care about, but it’s important to note that Dubas sent the pick back to the Blues on Aug. 13 along with a 2026 fifth-rounder for the Blues’ 2026 second-round selection and a third-round pick in 2025.
Throw in his other dealings unrelated to the draft weekend and Dubas has accumulated a total of nine picks for 2025. If it stands, it will produce the largest Penguin draft class since 2012, although there isn’t a second-round pick after they shipped it as part of the three-team Erik Karlsson deal.
Additional Notes
- The San Jose Sharks traded Pittsburgh’s 2024 first-round pick (14th overall), previously acquired in the Erik Karlsson trade, and a 2024 second-round pick (42nd overall via the New Jersey Devils in the Timo Meier deal), to the Buffalo Sabres for the No. 11 selection. The Sharks took two-way defenseman Sam Dickinson at No. 11, while the Sabres drafted playmaking center Konsta Helenius at 14 and physical defenseman Adam Kleber.
-The Penguins drafted right-shot defenseman Harrison Brunicke with the 2024 second-round pick it acquired from Carolina (via Philadelphia) in the Jack Guentzel trade. The final roll-up now reads Guentzel (who signed with Tampa Bay on July 1) for winger Michael Bunting, forward prospects Vasily Ponomaryov and Ville Koivunen, and Brunicke.
- The Anaheim Ducks drafted hard-shooting defenseman Tarin Smith with the 2024 third-rounder (79th overall) they acquired from Pittsburgh for defenseman Dmitry Kulikov at the 2023 trade deadline.
- The Calgary Flames drafted Russian goalie Kirill Zarubin with 2024 third-round pick (84th overall) they acquired from the Vegas Golden Knights (previously owned by the Penguins via Vegas in the Reilly Smith trade) in the deal that sent Noah Hanifin to the Golden Knights.
- San Jose drafted overage two-way defenseman Nate Misskey with the 2025 fifth-round pick (143rd overall) they acquired from Pittsburgh in the Nick Bonino three-team deal from the 2023 trade deadline. Also included in the trade was the Penguins’ 2023 seventh-rounder which ended up with the Washington Capitals and was used to draft French goalie Antoine Keller at 206th overall.
- The Penguins took overage defenseman Finn Harding with the 2024 seventh-round pick (223rd overall) they acquired from the New York Rangers at last year’s draft when the Rangers traded up from 91 to 90 to draft defenseman Drew Fortescue. Pittsburgh took Finnish puck-mover Emil Pieniniemi at 91.
MORE: 2023-24 NHL Farm System Rankings and Assessments (Pre-Draft)
Draft picks
Assessment: Average
It only took a single draft class for the Pens to plug the pipeline’s gaping hole at right-shot defenseman, marking the first time the Penguins secured that many defenders in one draft since taking four in 2017 (none of whom would appear in an NHL game, but that’s neither here nor there). Both Dubas and ex-scouting direct Chris Pryor (who took the same job in Colorado) shrugged off the suggestion that the staff intended to address positional need — Pryor unsurprisingly claimed it was “…just how the board fell” when asked if they specifically targeted the right side of the defense.
This overused reply is next to worthless in an age when team farm systems and those who occupy its ranks are publicly evaluated, assessed, and discussed on a weekly basis for 12 months out of the year, so it makes you wonder why scouts keep deferring to it when those asking likely know the answer before broaching the subject. In Pittsburgh’s case, they haven’t drafted four right defenseman in one draft since 2007, and a review of their 2006-07 pipeline revealed an overwhelming disparity between left and right shots from the back end; only three of the 20 defensemen drafted by the Penguins between 2001 and 2006 were righties.
Although I couldn’t find any post-2007 draft quotes from then-Penguins scouting director Jay Heinbuck, the aforementioned numbers speak for themselves, and the popular post-lockout requirement of matching lefties with righties made it all the more sensible for teams like the 2007-08 Pens to bring positional balance to the pipeline. Above all, two of the righties drafted — Robert Bortuzzo in Round 3 and Jake Muzzin in Round 5 — have each played over 500 NHL games after being clear-cut products of a draft-for-need strategy. This makes you wonder why it pains these scouting dudes to avoid being forthright after the fact, especially since drafting for need can be a good thing and the Penguins previously benefited from it. Perhaps they’ll speak of the importance of deception and the dangers inherent in revealing company secrets. But would it kill them to be honest and transparent once the cat is out of the bag?
The selected players themselves range between average and above average, but there were additional clues as to why the Penguins made the picks they made. First and foremost is their longstanding tradition of assuming risk with high-upside scorers; either those whose stock took a hit during the draft season and slid down the rankings or those penalized for a specific measurable such as size or foot speed. Naturally, this approach can be a double-edged sword, as Pittsburgh scouts flopped with Angelo Esposito in 2007 and Beau Bennett in 2010 as they scored big with third-rounders Bryan Rust in 2010 and Jake Guentzel in 2013 — the latter of whom were known scoring threats but dinged for their size. Although this year’s haul lacked a first-round pick, the drafting of energetic scoring forwards Tanner Howe (he of the WHL’s Regina Pats and Connor Bedard’s former winger) at 46th overall, and Mac Swanson way later at 207 showed yet again that the Penguins were willing to overlook size and long as the kids were among the top scorers among their peers and showed they can pile up points from working hard or simply be being highly cerebral and creative.
The add-on piece to what the Penguins did at the draft was how four of their six picks — Swanson and defensemen Harrison Brunicke (44th overall) and Joona Vaisanen (175th) — already had significant ties to the organization before being selected. Brunicke, a well-rounded defenseman for the WHL’s Kamloops Blazers, was personally vouched for by Penguins’ first-year WHL scout Robbie Sandland, who before joining the scouting staff was Kamloops’ director of player personnel and assistant general manager. Vaisanen was one of the USHL’s top point-producing defensemen while skating for the USHL’s Dubuque Fighting Saints and former head coach Kirk MacDonald, who will take over the same role for the Penguins’ AHL affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. And then there’s Swanson, a teammate of 2022 Pittsburgh fifth-rounder Zam Plate and leading scorer for the USHL’s Fargo Force, which happened to be owned by Penguins’ player development coach Matt Cullen. Rounding it out is double-overage defenseman Chase Pietila, whose brother Logan was signed to an AHL deal with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in early April.
Add all of this up and it appears crystal clear that drafting the person is as important to the Penguins as drafting the player. The problem with this approach is that it neither guarantees an upward development path nor automatically provides the AHL affiliate with kids who can hang. And doesn’t it seem strange that practically every post-draft press conference is as much about a kid’s character or interview prowess as his performance on the ice? So I guess we are all to believe that all 225 players chosen have great personalities, work hard, and are great at interviews. Gotcha.
Brunicke is mostly unspectacular but deserves credit for holding his own as a depth option on a powerhouse in 2023 and then a minute-eater on a doormat the season after. Although he was drafted at least a full round higher than I expected, the critical situation facing the right side made it necessary. Were there RHD options with higher scoring potential at 44th overall? Absolutely, specifically OHL’ers Luca Marelli and Henry Mews, each of whom would get drafted in the third round instead. Brunicke is the superior defender in terms of actual defending, but he placed 63rd in WHL scoring among defensemen despite his bulked-up usage and rarely did you see him kill a play and dictate terms from that point forward. His skating isn’t as effective a tool as it should be since carrying the puck past center can be problematic, so now it’s up to the Penguins to clean him up before he hits NHL ice.
Howe, who was taken a few picks after Brunicke, has been doubted for quite some time and I never thought it was fair. Whether it being his lack of height that was most concerning or that his production was driven by Bedard, Howe seemed to shrug off the criticisms by playing game-time hockey every shift — as in literally every shift. He’s a tough kid with great hands who scores in bunches and had leadership material written all over him.
Three of the next four picks were the aforementioned righty defenders, two of whom were double overagers but one, Finland’s Joona Vaisanen, a gifted puck distributor who will undoubtedly quarterback Western Michigan’s power play after the Broncos back end was hit hard by a wave of graduation (including 27-year-old Zak Galambos). On the defensive side is where fourth-rounder Chase Pietila from Michigan tech and seventh-rounder Finn Harding from the OHL’s Brampton Steelheads excel considerably, giving the Penguin depth chart a significant boost and allow the organization to intensify competition among prospects at every position, which wasn’t the case before Dubas arrived.
Nonetheless, the decision to draft for need despite not having a first-round selection and using three picks on later-round overagers won’t ever sit well at this end of the table. This draft class is adequate for a mediocre team with what is now an above-average farm system, but everyday NHL’ers won’t be revealed until several more seasons.