Penguins Make An Underwhelming Lars Eller Trade To Jumpstart Their (Not) Rebuild

The Pens were always gonna trade Lars Eller, but the return was nothing special.

The Penguins traded Lars Eller to the Washington Capitals for a 3rd round pick in 2027 and a 5th round pick in 2025. It’s the first of what should be a mass exodus of the Penguins’ veteran pending free agents this season, as the Penguins — who are definitely not rebuilding!!! — attempt to, let’s say, acquire assets so that they might “construct” a stronger roster down the line. Since they used to have a strong roster, I suppose you could call it a “RE-construction,” of sorts. It is NOT any other words that are very similar to that, though.

Why The Return For Eller Wasn’t Impressive

The Penguins were obviously going to trade Eller — they dangled him at the trade deadline last year, but teams all around the league had trouble moving players with term remaining on their deals — and getting anything for him is better than holding onto him. But given some recent comparable returns, getting just a 3rd rounder three years from now and a very late pick next draft doesn’t strike me as such an enticing return that the Pens had to jump on it ASAP.

Eller is 35, so he’s certainly up there, but he still put up 15 goals and 16 assists last season in a third-line-center role. Per Natural Stat Trick, he controlled 52% of the expected goals while he was on the ice despite only starting about a quarter of his shifts in the offensive zone. He was deployed in an extremely difficult defense-first role with a rotating cast of not-great wingers and he still mostly controlled play even on the defensively-challenged Pens, and notched 15 goals to boot. He’s on a similar scoring pace this season.

Centers are always in high demand. Last deadline, Alexander Wennberg, a defense-first third line center for the Kraken, got dealt to the Rangers for a 2nd rounder and a 2025 4th. Wennberg is younger than Eller, but put up similar stats (9 goals and 16 assists in 60 games last year at the time of the trade). Seattle retained half of his contract, which increases the return, but that still only brought his cap hit down from $4.5 mil to $2.25 mil — very similar to Eller’s $2.45.

I was holding out hope Eller could fetch a 2nd. A 3rd seemed like the very least, let alone a 3rd three years from now. He fetched a 2nd at the 2023 deadline, and hasn’t really declined. Most of the other true centers traded last season — Tomas Hertl, Sean Monahan, Elias Lindholm, and Adam Henrique — fetched 1st rounders. Eller’s nowhere near on the level of those players (though Henrique is 34), but those were pretty much the only true centers that got dealt all season, besides Wennberg and the extremely-washed Evgeni Kuznetsov (who still fetched a 3rd!) Centers are scarce, and cheap centers are even more scarce. A defensively-responsible center with Cup-winning experience who’s still scoring at a 15-goal pace and only makes $2.45 mil (which would be pro-rated to less than half that at the deadline) is a pretty decent asset!

So Why Make The Trade?

Other than the obvious reason, that the Penguins are all-in on acquiring futures and don’t have much need to keep around a 35-year-old pending free agent (albiet one who’s served the team extremely well), there are two silver linings to the Pens pulling the trigger on this deal now:

One: The Pens didn’t retain any salary. Retaining half of $2.45 million doesn’t mean anything to the Pens, but, teams can only retain salary on up to three contracts at a time, and the Pens are already retaining on two: Jeff Petry and Reilly Smith (Smith, by the way, fetched a 2nd.) Not retaining on Eller gives them the option to still retain on one more contract at the trade deadline, which they’ll need if they end up doing something “bigger” (either retaining on Pettersson to improve his market, or, god willing, if they can make some huge Karlsson type deal.)

The Pens also clear around $2 mil in cap space themselves, which they can use to take on another contract-for-an-asset like they did with Kevin Hayes and Cody Glass, or take back a bad contract as part of another deal to improve the return. Or use it to add a player (haha! Kidding.)

Two: The Pens open up playing time. Dealing Eller now opens up a third-line-center spot (and sometimes a second-line-center spot) for some of the other players the Pens are showcasing to trade, and for younger players down the line. When Kevin Hayes is healthy, he’ll likely get a crack at one of the center spots. Cody Glass might too. Later in the year, we’ll probably see Vasily Ponomarev there, or possibly Sam Poulin or Tristan Broz. If the additional ice time ends up helping to pad Hayes or Glass’s numbers and re-establish them to the rest of the trade market as true centers, maybe their eventual trade return will sort of “count” as part of this Eller trade. And we’d all much rather see Ponomarev and Broz get their feet wet in the NHL in the Spring than see 35-year-old Lars Eller run out the clock at the end of a lost season.

So, overall, this wasn’t an amazing return for Eller, but certainly fits with the Pens’ plans for this season, and won’t be their last player-for-futures trade. Whenever a deal like this goes down, there’s a tendency to think “I guess that’s what this player was worth after all,” and we’ll never know what else they could’ve gotten if they’d held onto him, so we’ll always be arguing hypotheticals. But given the scarcity of available centers around deadline time, and the return a similar player in Alexander Wennberg fetched last year, I expected a little more.

Farewell, Lars Eller! You were the best acquisition in Kyle Dubas’ Summer of Sucking™.