NHL trade grades: Penguins score meager win in Dmitry Kulikov trade, for now

Publish date: 2024-06-13

The trade

Penguins get: Defenseman Dmitry Kulikov

Ducks get: Forward Brock McGinn, third-round pick

Sean Gentille: All we can do here — the only thing that’s fair and reasonable — is to judge every deal based on the available real-world context. Is a team in better shape than they were beforehand, or are they not?

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Right now, about 90 minutes ahead of the deadline, Ron Hextall’s Pittsburgh Penguins are in better shape after this deal than they were beforehand.

It has nothing to do with Kulikov, a 31-year-old left shot who has been absolutely caved in by top-pair minutes with the abysmal Ducks. He’s a replacement-level guy on a good day, or at least he should be.

Where Hextall scored a meager win, maybe his last of the season, is in shipping out McGinn’s contract. He’d have carried a $2.75 million AAV for each of the next two years, and had been buried in the AHL after Hextall’s frantic salary dump-fest ahead of the Mikael Granlund deal. Hextall signed McGinn in one of his first acts as Pittsburgh’s GM back in the 2021 offseason. He’d gone 26 games without a point earlier this season as part of a bottom-six group that effectively kneecapped Pittsburgh and doesn’t look much better, regardless of all the shuffling Hextall has done.

Now, if the plan is to play Kulikov, Pittsburgh will likely have to move either Brian Dumoulin, Marcus Pettersson or Pierre-Olivier Joseph. Dumoulin is a pending UFA who’d probably need a sweetener for a team to want him. Pettersson has been the most effective of the three this season. Joseph is one of the organization’s few relevant players on an entry-level deal. We’ll see what the outcome is there. I’m skeptical that it’ll help the Penguins meaningfully, but we’ll see.

Anaheim bought a third-round pick for two years of McGinn and some retention on Kulikov. It’s easy to imagine them flipping him next year, maybe with some salary retained, to a team that needs a fourth-line body that can skate and kill penalties. Not bad.

Penguins grade: B
Ducks grade: B+

Dom Luszczyszyn: Getting out of Brock McGinn’s contract — $2.75 million for two more years — is a win. Getting Anaheim to retain money on Kulikov is technically a win too… if he’s a player a team wants to target. I wouldn’t have. But the deal does give Pittsburgh more cap flexibility and that’s important.

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Or, it would be for a different front office. After seeing Ron Hextall light valuable assets and cap space on fire to acquire Mikael Granlund, I’m really skeptical that more flexibility is going to be a good thing. The implications of this deal feels like an impending loss. Perhaps even a big one.

Let’s start with who they acquired: Dmitry Kulikov. He’s a left-shot defenseman who has spent his entire career drowning in top-four minutes with this season being his most egregious. Blame a bad team and a bad system all you want, but you can’t do that for every player on the team — not on a team that grades as the worst defensive team of the analytics era. They’re that bad because of personnel, personnel that included and featured Kulikov in a prominent role.

Maybe he does better on a better team in a smaller role. Maybe. He was genuinely good last year defensively and the Penguins have a strong history of rehabilitating defensemen. His usage this year hasn’t been easy. But last year looks like an outlier year too, one that is completely undone by Kulikov’s work this year. Kulikov was worth 1.8 wins per 82 last year. This year it’s the complete opposite: minus-1.8 wins. It’s hard to hurt a team that much on your own but we’re talking about a defender who is second last on the Ducks in expected goals percentage at 37 percent. He’s a big part of the problem — relative to a bad team, he’s been worse. According to data tracked by Corey Sznajder Kulikov has been a liability at retrieving pucks in his own zone, turning those retrievals into exits and is a turnstile at his own blue line.

A third-round pick to this team is meaningless and getting out of McGinn’s deal might be worth it alone. He’s been his own brand of awful this year and is an offensive black hole. But this is another move that doesn’t move the needle at best and may actually hurt the Penguins’ bottom line if Kulikov is as washed as he’s seemed this year. McGinn, as bad as he is offensively, is at least doing okay defensively this year.

And that’s just this deal, one that creates a log jam on the left side with Dumoulin, Pettersson, Joseph and Ty Smith. I’m not sure Kulikov is an improvement over any of them. If the logical conclusion comes to be trading Pettersson — the best one — then the Penguins will be the rare breed of team that spends plenty of assets at the deadline only to come out the other side a worse team.

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The “plan” is starting to take shape, but it doesn’t seem at all like a very good one.

Penguins grade: C-
Ducks grade: B

(Photo: Randy Litzinger / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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