With 2025-26 Season Just Around The Corner, Penguins’ Path Is Unclear

The 2025-26 NHL season will be a pivotal one for many teams.

The Detroit Red Wings are at a dire crossroads in a nine-year “will they, won’t they” mystery of playoff contention. The Edmonton Oilers have not yet locked up their all-time great talent – a pending unrestricted free agent – entering a season that follows two consecutive Stanley Cup Final losses to the Florida Panthers. The Boston Bruins need to decide whether it’s time to tear things down to the studs and trade their best player or try to rebuild on-the-fly around the few veterans they have. The San Jose Sharks need to figure out whether it’s worth trying to tank one more time for a true generational talent or if they’re better off letting the youth they already have fully take the wheel.

There are many other compelling storylines to follow across the NHL. And one of the most compelling – and perplexing – is that of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Many expected the Penguins to be quite active in the trade market over the summer. Although they made some moves – such as acquiring goaltender Arturs Silovs from the Vancouver Canucks and sending Alex Nedeljkovic to the Sharks – they weren’t the Erik Karlsson, Rickard Rakell, or Bryan Rust-type moves that a lot of people anticipated. Yet they also – surprisingly – decided to keep all 13 of their 2025 draft picks instead of leveraging any of them for young talent.

As a result, it’s difficult to tell what exactly the plan is for these Penguins in 2025-26. They have missed the playoffs for three consecutive seasons – which follows a 16-year postseason streak – and still have a core of 38-year-old Sidney Crosby, 38-year-old Kris Letang, 39-year-old Evgeni Malkin, and 35-year-old Karlsson. They also have what appears to be a bleak defensive corps and questionable-at-best goaltending, with Silovs, rookie Joel Blomqvist, and Tristan Jarry – waived in the middle of the 2024-25 season – presumed to be the frontrunners jockeying for the starting position.

Even if the Penguins are certainly getting younger and more talented on the periphery of their roster – among others, prospects Rutger McGroarty, Ville Koivunen, Filip Hallander, and Owen Pickering should have a decent shot at making the team out of training camp – they still lack a lot of the younger core pieces needed to sustain contention in the future.

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Penguins’ general manager and president of hockey operations has reiterated that he isn’t just interested in building a short-term winner as quickly as possible. Instead, he wants to build back up a culture of sustained success, which typically takes some time. He even expressed in his post-season press conference that the Penguins making the playoffs in 2025-26 would be an accomplishment.

If this is the case, it is a bit puzzling that the Penguins aren’t making the kinds of moves that indicate they’re going for the full rebuild – especially in a draft year that includes the best talent since Connor McDavid in 2015.

Of course, it’s never clear what is going on behind the scenes with Pittsburgh. Dubas and his staff keep a rather tight-lipped operation, so any number of things could be happening that folks simply aren’t privy to. Perhaps the offers for Karlsson, Rakell, and Rust simply aren’t high enough for Dubas’s liking. Maybe they are actively working on something involving one or more of those players. There could be other moves in the works that have nothing to do with those guys, too.

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But it’s also very possible that nothing of the like is happening. After all, the Penguins did just overhaul their coaching staff this summer, and they also made some moves on the forward front to make their roster better than it was last season.

In other words, there may be a world where Dubas and the Penguins don’t deem it necessary to draft Gavin McKenna in order to contend in the near- and long-term. Perhaps they see a vision of a contending future that includes at least one of Karlsson, Rakell, and Rust. Maybe they’re convinced that the defense and the goaltending is poor enough to put them in lottery contention even if they don’t move any of those guys.

After all, think about it: If the Penguins were to strike lottery gold and have the opportunity to draft McKenna next season – and Karlsson, Rakell, and Rust remain on the roster at that point – it stands to reason that they could turn things around both quickly and sustainably. They already have enough prospect talent and draft capital to target – for example – a young, talented left defenseman that could be part of their contending future. And that prospect talent, again, should begin to fill out the periphery of the roster this season and even more so in 2026-27. They’ll also have near-unlimited spending power in free agency next summer.

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It’s not really that difficult to see that potential vision. It’s still likely that at least one of the “big three” trade candidates won’t be on the roster through the end of next season, but it’s not impossible for the Penguins to compete with one or two of them still around.

But, at the end of the day, the Penguins are still too good as of right now to be surefire McKenna contenders. And – if keeping some of their veterans around in hopes of a quick but sustainable turnaround is the plan – they are still banking almost everything on a lottery ball falling the right way next season.

There are many paths Dubas and the Penguins can take from here, and there are still a lot more dominoes to fall. But even if that uncertainty makes the Penguins an interesting story for this upcoming season, it sure doesn’t make things any easier for them looking ahead to the future.

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