Koivunen, McGroarty recalls and the shape of the next Penguin team

03/29/2025 06:00 AM

What the new players could mean for next season

Two weeks ago, Kyle Dubas kicked around what might happen with recalls from the AHL and yesterday he got around to some action. Up to the big team are Rutger McGroarty and Ville Koivunen.

"I would say it's a very case by case basis, we'll evaluate it here each week and layout what we have ahead. I know people are clamoring for it, but we don't want to bring players up just to give them a test run or appease the fans or media. We have to do what's right for their development and we'll continue to do that over the coming weeks."

The recalls might not have been done for fan appeasement, but it still helps the cause just the same to see a pair of the top forward prospects in the organization get a crack at some NHL regular season action after both performed quite impressively all season in Wilkes.

Gretz touched on the reasoning and benefits behind doing it, but it was also summed up concisely here:

Dubas also directly referenced some of the fan response about if this would be in WBS's best interests.

"I'm not so worried about breaking up the mojo [in Wilkes]...That's part of the [AHL] level, you're going to have a different team every night at this time of the year," was Dubas' thoughts about shuffling top AHL players up to the NHL for a late-season stint.

It does suck for coach Kirk MacDonald and the AHL Pens in an obvious manner to lose two of their top forwards when they're pushing for playoff positioning. As Dubas said, at the same time the nature of minor league hockey is one with conflicting interests and fluctuating lineups in a vastly different world from what an NHL fan might be used to.

Among reasons 1A and 1B for getting a long AHL playoff run is development time for McGroarty and Koivunen, but then again in the three and five game formats for early rounds of AHL action there's no guarantee even if they stay that Wilkes will have more than a handful of postseason games. In the bigger picture, for those players personally there's much more to gain by getting into the big show for a handful of games to show their strengths and weaknesses for coaching and management to see and hopefully continue on the development path.

While it's easy to say that these stretch NHL games don't matter for the Penguins since they aren't going to build towards anything, that can be an incomplete perspective to take. These games definitely matter when it comes to individuals winning or losing jobs within the organization for next season.

Seeing Koivunen and McGroarty for what they can offer (and maybe what they still don't have at this stage of their development) is very important. It will help to tell the organization how necessary a player like Phil Tomasino might be for them moving forward. Additionally it gives information for what future off-season plans they might need (or not need) to make when it comes to players like Kevin Hayes and Danton Heinen that could be kept or possibly dealt over the summer.

The Pens are in a period of transition where a big part of last summer's roster building plans saw them take on players like Hayes and Cody Glass from teams that were willing to pay draft picks to drop salaries. If the Penguins shift gears into a different phase, as Dubas has signaled, they might not be in the market to keep going down that path. In that case, getting experience for the two recent call-ups shows its importance there for these final run of games to have better insight into what the homegrown players have and to not paint over the roster with veterans.

As of now, Pittsburgh has the following statuses for next season:

Top Six forwards: Sidney Crosby, Rickard Rakell, Bryan Rust, Evgeni Malkin
Bottom Six: Tommy Novak, Blake Lizotte, Noel Acciari, Danton Heinen, Kevin Hayes
Potential restricted free agents: Phil Tomasino, Connor Dewar
Unrestricted free agent: Boko Imama

There certainly will be player movement in the form of free agency and trades to add and subtract to the above. There's a possibility they could look to get younger by dealing a player like Rust or Rakell, but given the sky high reported trade ask for Rakell and the resistance to even consider thinking about moving Rust so far, then again they might not be in a hurry to move those players prior to next training camp either.

As Pittsburgh finally moves to get younger, they could conceivably be looking to build a NHL third line next season around Novak and one, if not two, of McGroarty and Koivunen. Those youngsters might even push to play on Malkin's line in a best case scenario, much like Tomasino has done at times this year.

Dubas wasn't fibbing when he said recalls wouldn't be for fan service to see these young players, but it still provides a little extra juice just the same to see what the organization hopes will be a couple of key players getting the opportunity to graduate to the NHL. That adds some value for everyone down the stretch where the results of the game won't matter very much. Setting that aside, what the Pens see and learn from Koivunen and McGroarty will very much be relevant heading into an off-season where the organization makes whatever plans for the direction they attempt in building the 2025-26 version of their squad.