PITTSBURGH — The rest of the Eastern Conference keeps getting better.

Though the Pittsburgh Penguins haven’t done anything wrong in recent days, they haven’t really done anything.

And that’s OK. Imprudent decisions this time of year can stymie a franchise for a long time.

There’s nothing wrong with being patient and not buying in what became a seller’s market. Kyle Dubas wanted to add talented young players to the Penguins’ roster. Make no mistake, several talented young players were dealt in recent days. Some are still available. He made it clear late Friday night at the team’s headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh that he liked a number of the players who were traded.

Liam Ruck first of the Ruck twins to be drafted

The Athletic Hockey Show

He simply didn’t have the ammunition to pull off the trades.

Fair enough. For the Penguins, and their fans, this might be the hardest part of this rebuild, or mini-rebuild, or whatever you wish to call it. Perhaps only now, as opposed to a couple of years back, we’re seeing how much damage was done by the Ron Hextall regime and by the first year of Dubas’ regime. The Penguins finally have what can be considered a reasonable minor-league system. It’s not great, but it’s at least middle of the pack around the NHL, which is an accomplishment. And it’s getting better and better.

Blowing it up for one trade isn’t something Dubas wanted.

In fact, he probably couldn’t even if he tried. Patience will be required for the moment.

Consider his answer when I asked him about the idea of making a trade in the past few days.

“I think, in some of them, we really just haven’t had the assets to get there,” he said. “If you go through the younger guys that have been traded, it was a fourth overall pick (the Bowen Byram trade to the Chicago Blackhawks). The Florida-Ottawa pick was a ninth overall pick. We were at 22.”

Several team sources speaking on background have told me in recent days that Dubas likes Byram quite a lot. He likes Mackie Samoskevich quite a bit, too. These are young players, first-round picks, players with high ceilings. That’s exactly what he’s looking for and exactly what he planned on acquiring all along this summer. He was very much interested in bringing at least one of them to Pittsburgh.

But his hands were tied.

Dubas was surprised by the asking prices around the league and even more surprised some teams met those asking prices. He didn’t have those kinds of assets to send, and I’m not entirely sure, in some cases, he would have made those deals anyway.

The market simply didn’t cooperate.

More trades were made before and during the first round. It was the same story.

“Some of the deals today, the picks were a little higher than ours,” he said.

This was almost certainly a reference to the Mason McTavish trade, which required the 15th and 29th picks. Dubas didn’t have two first-round picks to offer.

“We found in this last stretch that teams want the exact guys we’re looking for (and) in exchange in those deals, players in that group that we lack,” he said.

Here’s what I can tell you:

• The Penguins made a pitch for the above players mentioned but couldn’t match the asking price of the other teams involved unless they included players such as Ben Kindel or Sergei Murashov, which wasn’t on the table.

• The Penguins are finding some of their tradable assets aren’t quite as attractive on the open market as they might have expected.

• Dubas is not going to blow up his young core in Wilkes-Barre — guys such as Murashov, Harrison Brunicke and Bill Zonnon — for short-term gratification.

We also have learned one thing with certainty. Dubas isn’t going to make a big splash July 1.

Just ask him.

I did, in fact.

“We can be as aggressive as we want on July 1,” he said. “But if you look at what’s available, it could be an expensive mistake. I try to learn from the past. We’ll try to steer clear of that. If it’s not a significant move in the short run, rather than do something for the sake of doing it, I’d rather say we aspired to do it, but the options weren’t there. We’ve had to check down and continue to build it up the way that we have.”

It was a stunningly honest and direct view of the free-agency market.

Thus, Dubas will look for more trades Saturday and beyond.

“We’ll continue to stay active,” Dubas said. “It’s a shifting landscape, as everyone has seen. It might not be one gigantic type of transaction. We’ll stay active on those. It might be brick-by-boring-brick style.”

That’s not what fans want to hear, but it’s not the worst thing. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a few desperate deals can destroy you for a decade.

Dubas is aware of this.

All of which isn’t to say Dubas doesn’t want to make a splash. He did last week. He still does.

Dubas isn’t sure whether he’ll be able to pull it off anytime soon.

“We continue to work away at it,” he said. “What we wanted to have was not so much guys in their late 20s but in the range of some of the guys that were moved (this week). In past years, they haven’t gone for that level of asset. There were multiple top 10 picks moved, which isn’t overly common. We aspire to be involved in every one of those conversations. We didn’t have a top 10 pick because of the season that we had.”

Dubas said he has no regrets about the Penguins making the playoffs last season. He believes the lessons that Ben Kindel, Egor Chinakhov and others learned will be more important than being a few notches higher on the draft board.

One way or the other, big trades are coming. It’s a matter of when.

“We’re going to find that bridge,” he said, referencing players in their prime years to complement his young core of players and his resident legends in Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Erik Karlsson and Kris Letang. “It might be later this summer. It might be during the season or next summer. But we’ll stay after it.”

It’s not what anyone wants to hear, but it’s spoken like a general manager who has indeed learned from his mistakes and who is attempting to build a team properly and for the long run.

Notes

The Penguins have offered qualifying contracts to restricted free agents Chinakhov, Arturs Silovs, Joel Blomqvist, Ville Koivunen, Alex Alexeyev and recently acquired Hendrix Lapierre. … The Penguins selected forward Liam Ruck with the 22nd pick, their preference for players from the Western Hockey League again on display. A talented forward, Ruck projects to be at least a couple of years away from NHL action, but his offensive gifts are significant. He’ll remain in the WHL next season before playing for North Dakota in 2027. … Ruck’s twin brother, Markus, is expected to be a second-round pick, and it seems extremely possible — if not likely — the Penguins will select him. The twins, who have never spent more than four days apart, made it clear to teams at the NHL Draft Combine a few weeks ago they’d like to be drafted by the same team.