So Jim Rutherford, Friday evening’s hiccup aside, did a thing. Derick Brassard is a Penguin, Ian Cole is a Senator, Ryan Reaves is a Golden Knight, some smaller assets changed hands and a substantial amount of semi-laundered cap space is trapped in the troposphere between Pittsburgh, Ottawa and Las Vegas.
Let’s unpack.
1. The less said about the Pirates at this point, the better, so let’s make this brief: This is what going for it looks like. The odds that the Penguins land a single player as good as Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin in the foreseeable future is slim on its own. The odds they get two approach absolute zero. They recognize that, and they act accordingly. If you think they don’t deserve some amount of credit there, fine, but not every franchise is similarly tethered to reality. We know that first hand.
2. The desire to compare Brassard to Nick Bonino is understandable; he’s going to play on the third line, and that was Bonino’s job for a couple years. That doesn’t mean they’re particularly similar, though. Brassard is better, and by nearly any measure would be a second-line center on most teams. He’s got Bonino beat in career points per game (0.60 to 0.45) overall Corsi percentage (51.2 to 48.0, via hockey-reference.com) and relative Corsi percentage (plus-2.8 to minus-2.7.) In the latter, Brassard has been particularly good with the Senators at a plus-6.9. He drove puck possession much, much better than most of his teammates. Now his teammates are better.
3. Rutherford couldn’t drop $5-ish million on Bonino and Matt Cullen in the summer, then managed to bring in better replacements with higher salaries during the season. Let that marinate. That’s what happens when you have reliable depth players signed to cheap and/or entry-level deals; you can splurge a little down the line. In other words, if you know you can rely on the Dominik Simons of the world at $692,000, you don’t have to spend sign a veteran for two years and $3 million to do a similar job. That money adds up.
4. Brassard doesn’t check the “penalty-killing forward” box — like, at all — but that’s why you keep Riley Sheahan, Carl Hagelin and Carter Rowney around. Other guys can do that.
5. On Thursday, it seemed like Rutherford missed out on Michael Grabner. Grabner’s salary was too low to pass on, a stupid man said. So much for that. He’d have been a luxury, but he wasn’t a necessity.
6. Sheahan is a sneaky winner in all of this. If the Penguins decided to roll with him as 3C, the pressure to keep up his post-Jan. 1 production would’ve been high, and there was ample reason to doubt whether that’d have worked out for anyone involved. Now, he can settle in as one of the best fourth-line centers in the league and still potentially play with either Zach Aston-Reese and Conor Sheary. Not bad.
7. That presupposes that Sheary and his $3 million salary are still around after Monday. On Thursday, it seemed impossible that Brassard would make it here without Daniel Sprong, Sheary or Matt Hunwick heading out, so ... assume nothing, I guess.
8. It seems like carrying Brassard next season at $5 million would preclude the Penguins from signing Patric Hornqvist to an extension, and it wouldn’t make it any easier, but the salary cap is going to rise, and if they have Sheary and Hunwick as tradable assets ... assume nothing, I guess.
9. There are worse ideas than keeping Hunwick around and seeing what he looks like on the left side of a pairing with Jamie Oleksiak. If he’s your sixth defenseman, things are still going pretty well. Also, Chad Ruhwedel exists.
10. Brassard destroyed the Penguins in the playoffs with the Rangers and came close enough with the Senators. If nothing else, he can’t do that again. They should pick up Benoit Pouliot just to scratch him.
11. Filip Gustavsson seems like he could be good. When you have Matt Murray and Tristan Jarry, who really cares?
12. Ian Cole was a solid, important player on two Cup teams. He’s also the exact sort of guy that gets overpaid for that sort of thing down the line. Reaves was a great teammate and deserved better than turning into a constant debate data point on Pens Twitter. He also didn’t deserve a regular place in the lineup. So it goes.
13. Also, again, Sprong — still a Penguin. So after all that, the entire future isn’t even mortgaged. Not bad for a day’s work.
Sean Gentille: sgentille@post-gazette.com
First Published: February 24, 2018, 2:32 a.m.
