The Penguins traded Parker Wotherspoon to the Golden Knights for defenseman Kaedan Korczak.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Korczak, 25, is a right-handed defenseman listed at 6 foot 4 and 201 pounds. He’s signed for the next four seasons at $3.25 million. The trade was a cap-clearing one for Vegas, getting Wotherspoon at $1 million for one more year.<\/p>\n
Korczak was originally a second-round pick of the Golden Knights in 2019. He played 78 games with Vegas last season, scoring three goals and 13 assists.<\/p>\n
The move on the surface, would seem to accomplish two things — solidifying the right side of the blue line behind Erik Karlsson\u00a0and Kris Letang, and getting younger in the process.<\/p>\n
The trade-off would be that the left side of the defense is significantly weaker now, after Wotherspoon spent the full season on the top pairing next to Karlsson. The left-handed defensemen remaining under contract are Sam Girard, Ilya Solovyov Ryan Graves\u00a0and Caleb Jones,\u00a0plus Owen Pickering\u00a0as the front-runner from Wilkes-Barre.<\/p>\n
The move would also seem to suggest that the Penguins aren’t quite ready to pencil Harrison Brunicke\u00a0in for full-time NHL duty. The trade of Jack St. Ivany\u00a0on Monday looked to open a spot on the right side of the third pairing for Brunicke, but this trade filled that spot right back up.<\/p>\n
Kyle Dubas\u00a0said on Friday that given an underwhelming free agent market, and the prohibitive asks in trades for young players, they would have to build the roster “brick-by-boring-brick” moving forward as a result.<\/p>\n
If Korczak is another young “brick” to build up the right side, and more “bricks” are coming this summer to build up the left side with younger, impactful defensemen, then that could potentially add up to an improved blue line, even if in isolation this move seems like a step back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Penguins traded Parker Wotherspoon to the Golden Knights for defenseman Kaedan Korczak.\u00a0 Korczak, 25, is a right-handed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[201663,316412,385,160767,15550,91698,99],"class_list":["post-735395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-feed-article","tag-kaedan-korczak","tag-nhl","tag-parker-wotherspoon","tag-penguins","tag-penguins-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}