Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The 2025-26 Pittsburgh Penguins did not follow the expected script.
Not only were expectations shockingly low, there was a belief around the NHL that they were the only team that was actively not trying to win. The preseason talk focussed entirely on Gavin McKenna and the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery. The playoffs? Barely even a passing thought. About the best-case scenario people had was that they might be a little too good and take themselves out of the McKenna lottery, but not good enough to actually make the playoffs or do anything meaningful.
Then they went and won 41 games, finished with 98 points and not only made the playoffs, they made them comfortably. So comfortably that they had nothing to play for over the final week-and-a-half of the regular season. The biggest flaw for the season was a comical inability to win shootouts, but by pretty much every other objective measure they were a really, really good hockey team.
There was nothing flukey about their success or playoff appearance.
It was also a case of pretty much everything that needed to go right, actually going right.
The old guys showed they still had some juice, with Sidney Crosby topping the point-per-game mark for an NHL record 21st consecutive season, while Evgeni Malkin seemed to find the fountain of youth. Even more significant was the fact defenseman Erik Karlsson was re-born after getting away from Mike Sullivan and played like the Norris-caliber defenseman the Penguins expected him to be when they originally acquired him.
Even more than the old guys still having some juice, they also hit some big home runs with younger players.
First-round pick Ben Kindel made a shocking jump from the WHL to the NHL as an 18-year-old, and not only held his own as a center, but was one of the team’s best players for much of the season.
Egor Chinakhov came over in a mid-season trade from the Columbus Blue Jackets and had a breakout season offensively.
Pretty much every offseason move was a home run, with none bigger than Anthony Mantha signing a one-year, incentive-laden contract and scoring a career high 33 goals.
It was just unexpected success after unexpected success. Add all of them up together and you had a playoff team with home-ice advantage in the first-round. It was there, however, that things kind of went south as they were eliminated in six games by the Philadelphia Flyers. The offense that carried the team for much of the season completely disappeared, while goalie Stuart Skinner saw a sharp regression in his play from the regular season. Backup Arturs Silovs nearly played them back into the series, but a 1-0 overtime loss in Game 6 ended their comeback hopes.
On the surface, it kind of left the Penguins in some sort of a middle-ground. Definitely not a lottery team. Definitely not a contender.
The offseason so far has created even more questions about what the actual plan is.
Evgeni Malkin was re-signed.
Rickard Rakell, Bryan Rust and Erik Karlsson (for now) are still here.
They repeated a lot of the same type of moves from a year ago and took a lot of fliers on younger, cheaper players that had strong underlying numbers but never really had a chance to fully prove themselves in their previous organizations.
Nicholas Robertson fits the exact mold of the type of player they have been willing to gamble on. So does defenseman Kaedan Korczak.
There is even an Anthony Mantha-type gamble in Andrei Kuzmenko.
They are clearly not tanking, but with still nearly $14 million in unused salary cap space they are not really going all-in on anything, either.
I get why there is a sense that they are just treading water and not really choosing a direction. But like I wrote at PensBurgh a couple of weeks ago, the Penguins have clearly chosen a path. It’s just not as blatantly obvious as some other rebuilding teams.
They have almost no long-term salary commitments on the roster. Their salary cap situation is pretty much a blank-slate into the foreseeable future. Almost every move they have made over the past two-plus years has centered around either getting younger players onto the roster, acquiring future assets in the form of draft picks, or taking chances on young talent that might need a chance of scenery.
Over the past three drafts they have made eight picks in the top-46, five in the top-40 and four in the top-24. They still have all of their future first-round picks and multiple second-round picks in each of the next THREE draft classes, along with an extra third-round pick in 2028.
It’s clearly a long-term approach. It’s just not a tear-it-all to the ground approach. Given the way a lot of those rebuilds have gone over the past 10-plus years, I am okay with that.
The Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights just played in the Stanley Cup Final, and between the two of them there was only one player (Andrei Svechnikov from Carolina) that one of those teams actually selected with a top-three pick of their own. Even in Svechnikov’s case, that was in a season where they finished with the 11th-worst record in the league and had serious lottery luck go their way.
Now, granted, those teams had a healthy dose of players that were selected at the top of the draft by other teams, but they were not the result of a full-scale, tanking rebuild.
That’s something the Penguins are going to have to figure out here to really advance their version of a rebuild, because this 2026-27 team isn’t likely to be in a top lottery position, either. I don’t know if it’s a 98-point team. I don’t know if it’s a second-place in the Metropolitan Division team. But it’s certainly not a last place team by any stretch of the imagination. There is too much forward depth. Erik Karlsson is still there to take over games. The biggest wild-card is going to be the goaltending duo of Sergei Murashov and Arturs Silovs, which could either take them well above expectations again, or keep them out of the playoffs.
Kindel is an outstanding young NHL player that has a chance to be a core piece. Probably not THE piece, but definitely A piece.
Chinakhov has a chance to be a top-line scorer.
With the Ruck brothers (Liam and Markus), Bill Zonnon and Will Horcoff they have at least given themselves a couple of swings at reasonably high-upside players. Same goes for Harrison Brunicke, Tanner Howe and Peyton Kettles. I would still include Rutger McGroarty in that group. Not all of these guys are going to become NHL players, but if one of two of them break through and make it, that’s another piece. Draft picks are the one time quantity can sometimes be more valuable than quality in the NHL.
They have some young, complementary players that are already in place that could be here for a while.
They have draft pick assets.
There is actually some real depth in the farm system and prospect pool, with the farm system rapidly and dramatically improving from what it was two years ago.
But they are still missing the potential cornerstone player.
It’s going to take some luck, either in one of the aforementioned prospects emerging as one (Kindel, Brunicke or Murashov are the most likely bets there, I would imagie), or some real creativity and finding somebody in another blockbuster roster move.
Let’s talk about that a little more, as well as everything that went right and wrong this past season.