2026 Pittsburgh Penguins Forwards 3-year 5-on-5 Scoring

Since the NHL training camps are still a ways away, the young prospects don’t report for the rookie tournament for another two weeks, I was bored and wondering what else I can write about and realized I had not posted bubble charts in a while. This is just a way in which we can visualize the player’s role on the ice, who is out there carrying play and who is just benefiting from playing with good linemates. There is no singular metric for evaluating player production, regardless of how often people just players by one specific stat or another, so I wanted to look at their performance from a variety of different angles. I have a habit of being rather verbose and writing lengthier posts than I intended to, so I am going to split these up into multiple parts. Today we will be starting with how good the players are at scoring.

Roster Speculation part 4 – Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins Forwards

We are back again to try to speculate about what the lineup could look like and postulate about possible depth charts. I started off looking at the Pittsburgh Penguins roster and postulating who could make the NHL lineup and what the forward lines and D pairs could look like. Then I starting gathering the American Hockey League data to consider potential defense combinations for the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. So this time I am going to look at the forwards in the system to try to figure out who may be on the WBS roster and what the lines could look like in the AHL. This one, however, seems to be a lot more difficult and there is a lot more up in the air that we are still waiting to figure out before the season begins.

Roster Speculation part 3 – Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins Defensemen

For the first two posts I made we speculated about the possible NHL roster and depth charts for the Pittsburgh Penguins. So now that we are done speculating about the NHL lineup I wanted to take a look at postulations of what the minor league depth charts could look like. There are still a lot of unanswered questions, potential trades that could happen before Training Camp begins next month, wondering who will be waived and whether or not another team will claim them off waivers, as well as if any of the younger kids could force their way up into the NHL lineup resulting in even more veterans being waived. However, we have enough to work from to make some educated guesses about what we could expect to see. So today we are going to try to figure out what the AHL depth chart may look like and try to postulate possible D pairings.

Cruz Lucius and the 2026 College Free Agent Class

Today, as of writing this, it will be yesterday by the time it publishes, is August 15 and Cruz Lucius remains unsigned which means that the Pittsburgh Penguins have officially relinquished his player rights and he is now an Unrestricted Free Agent. With Lucius gone, it means that Ville Koivunen is the final piece remaining from the Jake Guentzel trade, Michael Bunting got traded away while Vasily Ponomarev defected to return to Europe. Although the draft picks acquired in those trades could still be solid returns, they also received a 2024 2nd round pick for Guentzel which became Harrison Brunicke, and got Thomas Novak and Luke Schenn for Bunting and then traded Schenn for a 2026 2nd which became Markus Ruck. Looking up articles to see who else is going unsigned and becoming an UFA today it would seem that Lucius is the top player in this year’s college free agency class, but I still wanted to see who else is available. Most likely none of these players will have any NHL impact, but I suppose they could be signed as minor league depth.

Roster Speculation part 2 – Pittsburgh Penguins Defensemen

Yesterday I decide to look at all of the players in the Pittsburgh Penguins system and try to ponder what the depth chart may look like, speculating about who gets sent down to the minors and postulating about what the lines could be. The reason this is a bit of a pointless exercise is that there is so much of a log jam in the depth chart that most people are anticipating that the team will have to make some trades before the season begins, otherwise they are going to have to risk losing players on waivers and just create a logjam in the minors which would block their prospect development. As it stands now there is no room for any of the younger players to move up to the NHL, and if any can force their way into the NHL opening night lineup it will require waiving some older veterans. There of course is the chance that somebody will be injured and thus delay the decisions, but that just makes this exercise even more difficult to estimate. There is also speculation that the Pens are waiting to see what players wind up on the waiver wire during training camp, since they are still hoping to find a good left-handed Top 4 D option to round out the lineup. But as I said yesterday, it is a slow time of the year with nothing to look forward to for another month, so might as well have fun looking at the Pens D.