Penguins brought back Kasperi Kapanen to be a top-6 forward - TribLIVE

The Pittsburgh Penguins are barely two weeks into an offseason that began way too early for their liking.

They have plenty of issues to sort out with their roster and relatively little salary cap space with which to work.

Yet, general manager Jim Rutherford didn’t waste much time in taking his first step towards re-crafting a lineup that fell well woefully short of ownership’s goal of winning the Stanley Cup title.

On Tuesday, he swung a multi-player trade in hopes of changing his team, even if the key piece the Penguins received was a familiar face.

Forward Kasperi Kapanen, the Penguins’ first-round pick in 2014, was reacquired from the Toronto Maple Leafs along with the NHL rights to minor league forward Pontus Aberg and defensive prospect Jepser Lindgren.

The price to reunite with Kapanen was considerable. To Toronto went the Penguins’ first-round pick (No. 15 overall) in this year’s draft as well as forward Filip Hallander, considered one of the organization’s top prospects in a very shallow pool of future assets.

Also jettisoned to the Maple Leafs were reserve forward Evan Rodrigues and minor league defenseman David Warsofsky.

Even if the transaction drops the Penguins’ already limited salary cap space to $9,171,492 (according to Cap Friendly), Rutherford was hasty to bring back Kapanen, whom the Penguins sent to Toronto during the 2015 offseason as part of the deal that landed star forward Phil Kessel and helped the franchise claim Stanley Cup championships in 2016 and ’17.

Rutherford seems to think Kapanen can help them claim the title in 2021.

“Well, we always liked him,” Rutherford said by phone Tuesday. “When you get a guy like Kessel, you’ve got to give up something. He’s young at 24. We’ve got (contract) control for four years. He can play in our top-six (forwards). He can kill penalties. We’ve been looking for ways to strengthen our top six. We feel now that we’ve got to the point that we’ve got the six guys that can go there.”

Given the presence of Jake Guentzel and Jason Zucker on the left wing and Bryan Rust’s success playing the right wing with center Evgeni Malkin in 2019-20, one would presume Kapanen was reacquired to play with franchise center Sidney Crosby.

Rutherford stopped just short of that conclusion.

“We’ll have to see how it goes in camp and what (coach Mike Sullivan) decides,” Rutherford said. “Rust and Kapanen are top-six guys. It will be a matter of what works for everybody. Kapanen could go with Malkin. Or Rust could go with Malkin and the other guy with Sid. We’ll see how it plays out.”

The 24-year-old Kapanen, whose experience with the Penguins was limited to a handful of preseason games in 2014, rarely played with top-tier centers such as Auston Matthews or John Tavares in Toronto during the 2019-20 regular season. According to Natural Stat Trick, his most common five-on-five ice time among the team’s centers during the regular season came with third-liner Alexander Kerfoot (258 minutes, 6 seconds).

He’s eager to potentially get an upgrade in centers with either Crosby or Malkin.

“It’s a very positive thing,” Kapanen said via video conference. “The fact that they think that I can be in one of those two spots is a huge honor for me, obviously playing with one of the better two hockey players. It does mean that I’ve got to hit the gym soon and start working hard for next year. I want to be great and I want to come into camp, be ready to go and show everybody that I’m not messing around.”

Kapanen experienced, by his own words, “a sophomore slump” with a Maple Leafs team that largely stumbled throughout 2019-20. In 69 regular-season games, he had 36 points (13 goals, 23 assists).

During the 2018-19 campaign, his first full season at the NHL level, he set career highs with games (78), goals (20), assists (24) and points (44).

“Two years ago, I had a good season,” said Kapanen, a right-handed shot. “Coming into this year, right off the hop, it wasn’t the start that I wanted. I don’t think it was the start that the team wanted, either. … Tough to say. … The puck wasn’t going in for me. Just overall, my game was very iffy. It’s something that I wasn’t too happy with.”

The son of long-time NHL forward Sami Kapanen, Kasperi Kapanen will be entering the second year of a three-year contract with a salary cap hit of $3.2 million in 2020-21 and is scheduled to become a restricted free agent in the 2022 offseason.

His addition rules out a potential return for pending unrestricted free agent forward Conor Sheary, most recently a right-winger on Crosby’s line. It also clouds the futures of pending restricted free agents such as goaltenders Tristan Jarry and Matt Murray as well as forwards such as Jared McCann or Dominik Simon.

Rutherford will cross that bridge when he gets to it.

“I’m concerned about (the team’s limited salary cap space),” Rutherford said. “Obviously, there’s going to have to be some players moved out. But I wasn’t going to wait because there’s going to be other players available but maybe not the fit that Kapanen is for us. We like the fact that he’s young. He can be in Pittsburgh for a long time. We like how he plays so when he was available, I wasn’t going to wait. We’ll try to sort the rest of it out as we go along.”

Rutherford acknowledged the price to reacquire Kapanen was ample. But given the organization’s approach of winning immediately, he wasn’t overly hesitant to deal away more future assets.

“We liked Hallander,” Rutherford said. “We don’t project him as a top-six guy or a guy that can make an impact for us in the next few years. And, obviously, the pick is going to take a few years, three or four years. And for what we’re trying to do to still contend within this window of our top guys … you don’t like to trade those kind of assets. But based on what we’re trying to do, it makes sense. We get a guy that’s ready to play and can come in and be a part of this group.”

Aberg, 26, appeared in five NHL games during the 2019-20 regular season and recorded one assist. Spending most of 2019-20 in the American Hockey League (AHL), Aberg, a right-handed shot, was the Toronto Marlies’ second-leading scorer with 44 points (20 goals, 24 assists) in 55 AHL games.

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Signed to a one-year contract with a salary cap hit of $700,000, Aberg (6-feet, 194 pounds) is a pending restricted free agent this upcoming offseason. A second-round pick (No. 37 overall) of the Nashville Predators in 2012, Aberg also has played for the Edmonton Oilers, Minnesota Wild and Anaheim Ducks. Aberg is signed with Traktor Chelyabinsk of Russia’s KHL. The Penguins could extend a qualifying offer to retain his NHL signing rights.

“In Aberg’s case, he’s played with a few NHL teams,” Rutherford said. “He’s a capable NHL player. He’s playing in Russia now. I would suspect he’ll stay in Russia this year, and we’ll have to decide whether we’re going to qualify him or let him go. He was part of this deal because he’s a guy that we feel can play in the league.”

Lindgren, 23, played in 31 AHL games with the Marlies in 2019-20 and scored nine points (one goal, eight assists).

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A fourth-round pick (No. 95 overall) in 2015, the right-handed Lindgren (6-foot-1, 197 pounds) will be entering the final year of a three-year-entry level contract in 2020-21 with a salary cap hit of $775,833. He is on loan to MODO of the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s second-tier league and can report to the Penguins once NHL training camps open in mid-November.

“Lindgren is a young defenseman,” Rutherford said. “He can come back when we start to play and can be assigned to (Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the AHL) if that’s what we decide. He’s still developing. He’s a little bit on the lighter side. But he’s a prospect.”

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Seth Rorabaugh is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Seth by email at srorabaugh@triblive.com or via Twitter .

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