Penguins leave Zach Aston-Reese, Brandon Tanev, Jason Zucker, others exposed for expansion draft
Like all his peers, Pittsburgh Penguins general manager Ron Hextall has a wish list of things he’d like to accomplish with his roster this offseason.
And like most other general managers in the NHL, Hextall doesn’t have a ton of financial wiggle room to work with thanks to the NHL’s salary cap remaining flat at $81.5 million for the second consecutive year.
“We’ve talked about adding some size and sandpaper up front,” Hextall said by phone Thursday. “That’s certainly something we’d like to do. That’s the main thing. Obviously, any other position, if we could upgrade, we certainly would like to. We’re up against the (salary) cap, so easier said than done.”
On Saturday, Hextall took some steps towards creating some space under his salary cap.
After trading versatile forward Jared McCann and his salary cap hit of $2.94 million to the Toronto Maple Leafs, Hextall submitted his list of players he will protect and expose leading into Wednesday’s expansion draft for the incoming Seattle Kraken franchise.
Among those exposed include players with three of the team’s 11 highest salary cap hits including forwards Jason Zucker ($5.5 million), Brandon Tanev ($3.5 million) and defenseman Marcus Pettersson ($4,025,175).
“The one thing we think is extremely, extremely valuable in this environment is cap space,” Kraken general manager (and former Penguins captain) Ron Francis said during a video conference on Saturday.
Of course, there is no guarantee Francis and company will select one of those three. In total, the Penguins exposed 23 players:
Forwards — Pontus Aberg, Anthony Angello, Zach Aston-Reese, Josh Currie, Frederick Gaudreau, Mark Jankowski, Sam Lafferty, Sam Miletic, Evan Rodrigues, Colton Sceviour, Brandon Tanev, Jason Zucker
Defensemen — Cody Ceci, Kevin Czuczman, Mark Friedman, Jesper Lindgren, Andrey Pedan, Marcus Pettersson, Juuso Riikola, Chad Ruhwedel, Yannick Weber
Goaltenders — Casey DeSmith, Maxime Lagace
Ceci, Currie, Czuczman, Gaudreau, Lagace, Rodrigues, Sceviour and Weber are pending unrestricted free agents as far as their NHL rights are concerned. Currie and Weber already have signed with teams in Europe for the 2021-22 season.
Aston-Reese, Jankowski, Lindgren and Miletic are pending restricted free agents.
The Penguins control the NHL rights of Aberg and Pedan, each of whom never has played for the Penguins at the NHL level. Both spent last season in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League (KHL).
Seattle has an exclusive window — which opened Sunday morning — to interview all pending unrestricted and restricted free agents who were exposed in advance of the expansion draft.
As for who the Penguins protected, that list wasn’t shocking.
Forwards — Teddy Blueger, Jeff Carter, Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel, Kasperi Kapanen, Evgeni Malkin, Bryan Rust
Defensemen — Brian Dumoulin, Kris Letang, Mike Matheson
Goaltender — Tristan Jarry
By rule, Crosby, Letang and Malkin were automatically protected because of the no-movement clauses in their contracts.
Carter was perhaps the most curious name to be protected. Given his age and his contract status — he has one year remaining and carries a salary cap hit of $2,636,364 to the Penguins — he could theoretically have retired if he were selected by the Kraken.
But with Malkin likely sidelined for some portion of the regular season and McCann jettisoned to Toronto, the Penguins didn’t seem interested in entertaining even a minimal risk of losing Carter and further depleting their depth at center.
“There’s many things that come into play,” Hextall said. “Your depth at a position. The contracts, the age. We’ve looked at everything in terms of every player. You make your decisions based on that. Some, for a lot of teams, are going to be contract-related. There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s not as probably simple as we’d all like to think it is.”
Currently, the Penguins have $3,946,795 of salary cap space according to Cap Friendly. That figure could grow substantially by Wednesday depending on who the Kraken select.
“We’re at a tight squeeze here cap-wise,” Hextall said. “It’s certainly something that we will continue to monitor as we go along here and see if there’s a move here that alleviates our cap issue.”
Seth Rorabaugh is a TribLive reporter covering the Pittsburgh Penguins. A North Huntingdon native, he joined the Trib in 2019 and has covered the Penguins since 2007. He can be reached at srorabaugh@triblive.com.
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