Pittsburgh Penguins: Can they add a centre before next season?<\/p>\n
GM Kyle Dubas has had a tricky job to balance between an aging core that wants to compete with a clear need to bring in some youth and prepare for the next era, whenever it arrives. He\u2019s done pretty well in acquiring some early-to-mid-20s players, with Yegor Chinakhov the shining example last season. The front office will continue looking for those types of players, or to make a big play for someone. They certainly were in conversations with Dallas about trading for Jason Robertson.<\/p>\n
One area of the roster we could identify as a need to improve on is down the middle. Evgeni Malkin is a winger now, and while Ben Kindel was a great and surprising story in his rookie year, ideally the Penguins would have another productive veteran to take top-six centre minutes. Centres can be hard to come by, but there have been a few available this off-season. In terms of identifying one available centre who isn\u2019t too old, has a depressed value, but still holds upside: what about Vancouver\u2019s Elias Pettersson?<\/p>\n
\u201cLook he\u2019s got to play better in that $11.6 million everyone\u2019s been talking about, but again, the ground has shifted here in a huge way,\u201d Friedman said of Pettersson. \u201cI\u2019ve sat there and I\u2019ve said \u2018where could he go that could be good for him?\u2019 I wonder if the Penguins with Crosby and Malkin might be good for him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh Penguins: Can they add a centre before next season? GM Kyle Dubas has had a tricky job…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[257,385,99],"class_list":["post-756832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-general","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756832","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=756832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}