This Penguins Season Is Nuked. Next Year Should Be Too.
The Penguins have no path forward but to suck again next year.
There’s an old poker expression: “If you can't spot the sucker at the table, then you are the sucker.”
Similarly, in the NHL, if you can’t spot which team is tanking…it’s probably you.
The Penguins’ season is over. They’ll spend the next couple weeks trading whomever they can, then playing out a meaningless home stretch of games and finishing with a cool, refreshing high draft pick to kick back with after a long season of sucking.
The next question they have to answer is, what about next year? And the answer to that question, when you look at the Penguins’ roster, their prospect pipeline, and all the teams in the league around them, is really, really clear: they have no choice but to rebuild for another year. Here’s why:
1. No One Else Is Tanking
In an unusual turn of events, every other team in the NHL right now is either in “win now” mode, or has already bottomed-out during a rebuild and is attempting to get better. There isn’t a single team in the league (besides maybe the one in Pittsburgh) that you can point to and say, definitively, that they will not make the playoffs next year. Or at the very least, that the franchise doesn’t have the goal of reaching the playoffs next year.
Look at the non-playoff franchises right now. San Jose and Chicago already drafted franchise talents with first overall picks and both tried to add this offseason. Anaheim, Buffalo, Utah, Montreal, and Columbus have all been rebuilding for years, have an overabundance of prospects, and are all trying to take that next step towards contention. Nashville and Seattle both spent a bunch of money this offseason and have really struggled, but will likely try to get back on track next year. St. Louis tried to make the playoffs this year. Philadelphia is a bit of a wildcard, but they don’t seem too interested in moving backwards. None of these teams will be in active “tank” mode heading into this offseason.
The only three other teams I could see possibly rebuilding are the Bruins, the Rangers, or the Islanders, but even those teams are pretty unlikely to flat-out tank. All three of them gave big extensions to their top-tier goalies, and all three GMs are desperate to win; Boston’s Don Sweeney and the Rangers’ Chris Drury are both already on the hot seat, and the Islanders’ Lou Lamoriello is 82 years old and perpetually in win-now mode. But if any of those teams fire their GMs, they might decide that taking a step back for a year and selling is worth it.
Of course, some teams are still going to suck even if they try to get better, and some teams will have injuries or underperform early on (like Nashville this year) and decide to pull the plug and become sellers. But almost no one will go into next year not trying to be better than they were this year. There’s never been a better time for the Pens to be bad from the getgo, and to spend one more offseason in pure “sell players for futures / take on bad contracts for picks / don’t sign anyone long term” mode.
2. The Penguins’ Prospect Pool Is Better, But It’s Still Not Good
Kyle Dubas and the Penguins’ staff have done some really nice work adding prospects through the Jake Guentzel trade and last year’s draft. They’re currently sitting on a ton of extra draft picks in the next three drafts, with more picks likely to come at the trade deadline and the offseason. They’ve also transformed the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins into a prospect-driven team with a new coach, and the Baby Pens are sporting the 5th best points percentage in the AHL. All of this is progress.
However, while it’s nice the Penguins finally have some prospects, fans do need to temper that enthusiasm with the reminder that every other team in the NHL also has prospects. Most other teams actually have more prospects and/or better prospects than the Penguins. The Pens’ system is improving, but they have a long way to go.
In January, Scott Wheeler at The Athletic ranked the Pens’ prospect pool 20th in the NHL, a vast improvement from their perpetual bottom-3 ranking on basically every prospect list for the last 15 years, but still second to last in the division behind the Rangers (19th), Flyers (18th, not even counting Michkov), Devils (17th), Hurricanes (16th), Capitals (9th), and Columbus (6th, again not counting Adam Fantilli or any of their other young NHLers).
On Scott Wheeler’s Top 100 Drafted Prospects list, the Penguins only had two players: Rutger McGroarty at #44, and Harrison Brunicke at #63. Washington’s Ryan Leonard ranked #8, the Rangers’ Gabe Perreault ranked #9, New Jersey’s Simon Nemec and Anton Silayev ranked #12 and #14, Columbus’ Cayden Lindstrom and Denton Mateychuk ranked #15 and #17, and even the Islanders’ Cole Eiserman ranked #18.
These prospect lists obviously aren’t the be-all and end-all of how a team’s young players will end up panning out, but it’s a helpful reminder that the Penguins won’t just add their current prospects to their lineup and start gaining ground on all the other teams around them; those other teams all have prospects too, many of whom are better than the Pens’ prospects. Sure, some of the Pens’ less-heralded prospects might turn out better than expected, but again, that’s also true of every other team’s less-heralded prospects.
The Penguins need more high-level, impact prospects in the organization before they can even consider building back up again. Whomever they draft in the first round this year will immediately become their #1 prospect. If they tank next year and get another top-5 pick in the loaded 2026 draft (especially if they win the Gavin McKenna lottery), that prospect will probably become their new #1 prospect. Being bad and accumulating picks in 2025-26 would immediately accelerate the franchise’s future outlook.
3. The Pens Have No Other Path To Contention
As bad as the Pens have been this year, I actually don’t think it’s impossible, if they really wanted to, that they could make some splashy moves this offseason, change the coach, and get better goaltending, and make the playoffs in 2025-26. We saw how wide open the East was this year, and how close this unspectacular iteration of the Pens was to a playoff spot for most of the year, even with near league-worst goaltending.
That said, does anyone, even the most optimistic Pens fan in existence and/or Sidney Crosby or Mike Sullivan hooked up to a lie detector, think that the Penguins can turn themselves into actual legitimate Stanley Cup contenders between now and October 2025? No freaking way. And if the answer to that question is a resounding no, that should be the end of the discussion right there.
Yes, the Pens will have lots of cap space next season, but so will most other teams in the NHL. Carolina and Columbus will have nearly $40 million in cap space. Sure, the Pens don’t have any big RFAs they need to lock up anytime soon, but they don’t have so much more cap space than other teams that they can totally revamp their team with signings.
You might hear people say, “But they owe it to Sidney Crosby to try.” Sure, the franchise owes Crosby everything, but would even Crosby want to be a part of some half-assed fake attempt to go all-in to get the 7th seed and lose in the playoffs? AND set the franchise rebuild back another couple years? And probably end up sucking and missing the playoffs anyway?
The Pens should use next year to sign some more stopgap players they can flip at the deadline, start getting young players some NHL exposure, take on more contracts for picks, and possibly leverage some of their minor assets for younger players like they did in the Tomasino trade. Otherwise, they shouldn’t be trading major assets or locking themselves in to any long-term free agent deals.
The Pens’ rebuild doesn’t have to take a “Buffalo” amount of time, but it absolutely does have to take more than one season. The Penguins have no other choice but to be bad again in 2025-26, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Let Crosby get his point per game and let’s ROLL IN THE TANK!!!
