CRANBERRY, Pa. -- Kyle Dubas has kept up with what has been written and said about his team leading into this season.
He's seen "forecasts" that the Penguins should be just on the bubble of a playoff spot once again this season. He's heard outside noise that this is the Penguins' last real shot at a run, and if they fail to make the postseason again, "that will slowly draw this era of Penguins hockey to a close."
He doesn't quite agree with much that has been written. And he thinks the Penguins will prove all those takes wrong.
"The way that I look at it is that this season, and this chapter, represents our chance to change the story," he said in his pre-season media availability at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex on Monday.
Each time Dubas spoke earlier in the offseason, he seemed to be tempering expectations. He spoke about not wanting to sneak into the playoffs just to say they made it if they weren't real contenders. He said over the summer that "it's hard to put a time frame" on when he could see this team being a contender again, whether it would be this season or the following season or beyond. He made clear over the summer that it wasn't going to be a "strip it down to the studs" rebuild just yet, but he also came off as being content with treading water in the standings if it meant they could retool in the background and build up draft capital and other futures along the way, and set them up for more success a year or two down the line.
Dubas on Monday, after a long summer of reshaping a fair bit of the Penguins roster and adding younger pieces who could push for playing time in the near future, seemed much more optimistic about what the Penguins can accomplish this season.
"What our goal is, is to be playing very meaningful hockey in March, April and beyond," Dubas said. "I think that if our group can come together, if we can always channel back and protect those core foundational principles of the Penguins, develop everybody internally, have our younger players start to push from Wilkes-Barre up and get the most out of everybody that's in our building, we can accomplish that this season."
The Penguins set their season-opening roster ahead of Monday's 5 p.m. deadline. After moving Matt Nieto to long-term injured reserve, Vasily Ponomarev to injured non-roster, and Bryan Rust, Alex Nedeljkovic and Blake Lizotte to injured reserve, as well as sending Harrison Brunicke back to junior and re-assigning Boko Imama and Sebastian Aho to the AHL, the Penguins were left with a 22-man roster that looked like this in practice:
Drew O'Connor - Sidney Crosby - Anthony Beauvillier
Michael Bunting - Evgeni Malkin - Rickard Rakell
Rutger McGroarty - Lars Eller - Jesse Puljujarvi/Valtteri Puustinen
Kevin Hayes - Cody Glass - Noel Acciari
Matt Grzelcyk - Kris Letang
Marcus Pettersson - Erik Karlsson
Ryan Graves - Jack St. Ivany
Ryan Shea
Tristan Jarry
Joel Blomqvist
The immediate takeaways: That's a bottom-six that (on paper) looks like it has the potential to provide more offense than it has in the last few seasons. And from O'Connor starting on the top line, St. Ivany breaking in on the third line, and with McGroarty, Puljujarvi, Puustinen and Glass around to start, there's a bit more youth among the skaters, too.
That's all by design.
Dubas said that the Penguins "have to get away" from the idea that the bottom-six has to be defense-first. They need balance, and that's something that had been lacking.
"We need to score in that group," Dubas said. "We need to defend our ass off with that group too, don't get me wrong, all through our lineup. But we need guys that are able to produce as well."
That's where the youth comes in, too. When the Penguins are healthy in their top-six, it's going to be hard for a guy to come up from the AHL and immediately break into those two lines. But they do have a decent number of skilled, offensive forwards pushing for spots in the near future. Instead of cramming them into a defensive bottom-six role that they're not suited for, the idea is to make the lines more suitable for those kinds of players ... especially one like McGroarty.
McGroarty, acquired this summer from the Jets in the Brayden Yager trade, is a bit of a surprise addition to the season-opening roster. It's not common to see a player go from college straight to the NHL, but it's looking like that's what McGroarty is going to do. Part of that is due to the Rust and Lizotte preseason injuries creating opportunity, but McGroarty himself is responsible for getting to where he is.
"My observation of Rutger, he's earned that," Dubas said. "There was nothing guaranteed to him whatsoever. And I thought during camp, from (the Prospects Challenge) all the way during camp, in every practice, every single game, I thought he continued to get better and better as the level raised. More so than his skill set, I think it's his intelligence and his instincts and his strength and his ability to make reads and make plays, even defensively. It's not always the highlight-reel stuff that you see in other markets on their prospects. It's just solid hockey. And I think he's just a hockey player."
Dubas constructs the roster and decides who sticks at the NHL level, but he views the day-to-day lineup decisions as Mike Sullivan's domain, though the two do have "deep conversations" on those decisions. Dubas didn't want McGroarty to be in the NHL if he would only be a scratch. But he's going to play, and that's why he's sticking around for the foreseeable future.
There are a few more of those young guys knocking on the door, too.
I asked Dubas which prospects stood out in the preseason and made cases for themselves for early recalls in his eyes, and he started out by shouting out a few standouts from the Prospects Challenge last month -- AHL-contracted forward Avery Hayes, first-year pro Tristan Broz, and a pair of 2024 draft picks on defense in Brunicke and Finn Harding, both of whom will be back in junior this season. Getting into training camp and the preseason, Dubas mentioned forwards Broz, Ville Koivunen and Vasily Ponomarev all "having their moments" and "starting about level" going into this season. But the prospect he said he was "extraordinarily impressed with" was Owen Pickering.
"I just thought he continued to improve and get better and better every single session and in every game, which I was extremely encouraged with," Dubas said. "Now, it's going down (to Wilkes-Barre), can we keep the foot on the gas for him? One of the things we've talked to him about is you're probably not going to come up here and be on the power play to start, with (Kris Letang and Erik Karlsson), you're probably not going to supplant one of those guys. So let's focus on five on five. Focus on becoming the elite penalty-killer. That's going to be the path to get here."
Just how quickly Pickering and the other prospects make it through that path will impact a lot of the Penguins' decisions moving forward. Oct. 7 is a little early to be talking about pending free agent decisions, but the Penguins have a lot of unrestricted free agents coming up -- Eller, Beauvillier, O'Connor, Nieto, Puljujarvi, Pettersson, Grzelcyk and Shea. Of that group, Dubas called Pettersson a "key guy," and put him and O'Connor in their own category of being ones they'll "treat a bit differently." But for all their decisions, they want to leave the door open for young guys to come in and take those spots.
"We'll look at (the free agents) all case-by-case," Dubas said. "Where we're at, where we're going. But I think that for us, the key is to protect all of our options as we go through the year. See how our own young guys are evolving and developing and measure that as we go."
Dubas has made clear in his year-plus on the job that he'll react accordingly as the trade deadline nears base on how the team plays. If the team doesn't look like it can be a contender -- like last season -- then he won't waste future assets adding to a group that's not ready to make a run. But if the Penguins meet the expectations Dubas has for them this season, it wouldn't be surprising to see him to add and improve the roster as the season goes on.
For now, the roster is the roster. It might not top many lists projecting who this season's contenders might be. It'll be up to the players and staff to prove that the door hasn't shut on this era of Penguins hockey.
"We don't come in with any preconceived notions anymore that we're going to walk in and be a favorite, or we're going to walk in and strike fear into anybody," Dubas said. "We're going to have to have to earn that, and we're going to have to build that competitive spirit with this iteration of the team throughout each through every single day, in practice, in the gym, and each and every game that we play."
That real work starts when the puck drops for the regular-season opener on Wednesday at PPG Paints Arena against the Rangers.
