Expectations for what a Penguins rebuild might look like and what it might produce

Keep your expectations for these trades within reason.

The writing is on the wall here that the Pittsburgh Penguins might actually be entering the initial stages of a rebuild. Whether it actually happens now, or a year from now, or at some other point it has been a long time since we have actually had to watch a process like this play out.

The Jake Guetnzel trade last year was the first major shoe to drop.

The bad start to this season and the Lars Eller trade this week were next.

There will be more.

You have to go back nearly 25 years for the last time the Penguins actually had to do this.

If there is one thing that process can teach us about what might be ahead, it’s that the players, prospects and draft picks the Penguins acquire over the next year or two as part of some sell-off are not likely to be a part of the next Stanley Cup contending Penguins team.

I went back and looked at every trade the Penguins made between 2001 and 2005 (their last rebuild), the returns they got, and the players they ended up getting out of those deals.

The trade that really started that process was, obviously, the Jaromir Jagr trade to the Washington Capitals.

Jagr was the biggest star in hockey at the time (well, until Mario Lemieux returned) and the best offensive player in the world. Trading him was the first sign that things were about to be very, very different in the coming years.

During the four-year stretch that followed the Penguins made 36 different trades.

Below is the list of players they traded, the list of players they received, and the draft picks they received.

Players traded: Jaromir Jagr, Stephan Richer, Darius Kasparaitis, Andrew Ference, Alex Kovalev, Mike Wilson, Dan Lacouture, Janne Laukkenen, Randy Robitaille, Wayne Primeau, Ian Moran, Jan Hrdina, Francois Leroux, Shean Donovan, Johan Hedberg, Martin Straka, Drake Berehowsky, Mark Moore, Billy Tibbetts, Steve Parsons, Krysztof Oliwa, Marc Bergevin, Mike Moller, Brendan Buckley, Steve Webb, Brian Holzinger, Marc Bergevin, Dick Tarnstrom, Cory Cross, Mark Recchi

Players received: Kris Beech, Russ Lupaschuck, Michal Sivek, Rick Berry, Ville Nieminen, Rico Fata, Richard Lintner, Joel Bouchard, Mikael Samuelsson, Matt Bradley, Ramzi Abid, Dan Focht, Guillaume Lefebvre, Micki Dupont, Mattias Johansson, Martin Strbak, Sergei Anshakov, Ric Jackman, Bert Robertson, Jamie Pushor, Kent Manderville, Shawn Heins, Brian Holzinger, Pat Hughes, Pauli Levokari, Landon Wilson, Alain Nasreddine, Lasse Pirjeta, Jani Rita, Cory Cross, Krystofer Kolanos, Niklas Nordgren

Draft picks received: 2003 seventh-round pick (#229), 2004 third-round pick (#85), 2003 fifth-round pick (#161), 2003 fourth-round pick (#121), 2004 second-round pick (#61), 2003 ninth-round pick (#273), 2004 seventh-round pick (#222), 2007 fourth-round pick (#118), 2007 second-round pick (#41)

There was one other major trade that did not really fit into the traditional rebuild model (a draft-day trade) where they traded one of the players received (Mikael Samuelsson) and a No. 3 overall pick to the Florida Panthers for a No. 1 overall pick which was used to select goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, who would ultimately go on to be a significant part of the Penguins’ rebuild.

My biggest takeaway from these lists: Almost nobody — and I mean nobody — that they acquired was actually a part of the next good Penguins team.

If you go through that list, player-by-player and draft pick-by-draft pick, here is the list of acquired players and picks that actually played in a playoff game for the Pittsburgh Penguins.

• Marc-Andre Fleury
• Alex Goligoski (selected with the 2004 second-round pick No. 61 overall)

The Penguins also used the 2007 second-round pick (No. 41 overall) to trade for Nils Ekman who played in one playoff game with them.

That is it.

That is the list.

Every other player, whether they were a young NHL player or prospect or more established player, and almost every pick ended up just being short-term roster filler. Which you still need. Even in a rebuild you still have to put an NHL roster on the ice, and somebody has to fill those spots. Most of those players were simply not good enough to stick around.

The next good Penguins team, and especially the next Stanley Cup team, was primarily built around the following types of players.

• Lottery picks (Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Jordan Staal, Ryan Whitney)
• Their own first-round draft picks and internal prospects from before their rebuild started (Colby Armstrong, Brooks Orpik)
• Their own draft picks not acquired in trades (their own second-round and third-round picks at the top of the rounds; not mid-round picks at the back end of the rounds)
• Free agents (Sergei Gonchar, Mark Eaton, Petr Sykora and if you are going into the Stanley Cup years — Ruslan Fedotenko, Miroslav Satan)
• Trades for established players after the team already improved and become a playoff contender again.

The overall point here is, we can look at these future draft picks, or players like Vasiliy Ponomarev or whatever future prospects they acquire in the coming months or next year or two and discuss their long-term future all we want. But there is a very good chance none of them will ever play in a playoff game for the Penguins.

Especially if they are unable to get (or do not prioritize) first-round picks as part of the returns.

You are not going to rebuild with late third-and fifth-round picks, or with other team’s fourth-and fifth-best prospects.

Granted, this incoming rebuild and the previous rebuild came under very different circumstances for both the Penguins and the NHL. The Penguins were in financial jeopardy 25 years ago and the league did not have a salary cap. Shedding salary and getting cash back in return was the motivating factor in a lot of those deals (specifically the Jagr and Kovalev trades), and the general manager orchestrating that rebuild (Craig Patrick) had lost some of his magic touch that had made the team a Stanley Cup winner in the earlier part of his tenure. It is a totally different economic environment for the Penguins and the NHL, and they have a general manager now who seems to be at least more in tune with the modern NHL and has not had the game pass him by. You can debate the moves that do get made, but it is still a very different situation.

Even so, if you look at the rebuilds in the recent NHL that have been successful (specifically the New York Rangers and Los Angeles Kings) they were not largely built through sell-off trades. Both teams had established veterans stick around through the process, and both made some big splash free agent signings and trades for established players to accelerate the process.

The Penguins are going to need a lot of that in the coming years. They will need draft lottery luck. They will need to still make some big moves that are not centered around collecting mid-round picks in the hopes that they catch lightning in a bottle with one or two of them.