Kyle Dubas completed his first major trade at the helm of the Pittsburgh Penguins by acquiring Reilly Smith from the Vegas Golden Knights for a third-round pick on Wednesday.
Smith has his hands all over Vegas’s record book. He leaves Nevada second in franchise goals, third in points, and fourth in games played. A trade acquisition at the 2017 expansion draft, he was one of just six original Golden Knights still with the team.
The Stanley Cup champs have had their share of salary-cap struggles in recent seasons, and moving Smith’s $5.25M AAV cap hit through 2025 will go a long way toward ensuring they can actually play all their stars on a nightly basis.
The trade continues a ruthless business model from the Knights and GM Kelly McCrimmon. He traded Marc-Andre Fleury after a Vezina-winning season two summers ago and Max Pacioretty, who scored .86 points per game in Las Vegas, a little under a year ago. Both players netted less than the third McCrimmon received for Smith.
If McCrimmon has been heartless, it’s working; the Golden Knights rolled to their first Stanley Cup earlier this month without going to a Game 7.
While the deal perpetuates a severe lack of sentimentality by the Vegas brass, it also kicks off the Dubas era in a way that is all too familiar to Pittsburgh fans: old and expensive.
Smith is a top-six stud coming off of his best season (26G, 56P in 78GP) since 2019-2020, but at 32 and with two years of $5.25M left, he is a risk for a Penguins team that is already getting burned by Jeff Petry and Mikael Granlund.
Add in the fact that Jake Guentzel is in a contract year, Bryan Rust and Rickard Rakell are over 30 and signed for $5M or more through 2028, and the Penguins have the driest prospect pool in the league, and this feels like a step backward by Dubas.
Though harsh, it makes sense that Vegas would jettison Smith’s number to try to keep their contention window open. It is much harder to see what Pittsburgh means to achieve.
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