Penguins Sign Ville Koivunen To Eight-Year Extension

Given how little precedent there is for a player with Koivunen’s résumé to receive a contract of this magnitude, it is a genuinely fascinating deal to break down. To some, it probably seems like a reckless, speculative bet on a player who hasn’t yet shown he’s an NHL-caliber talent.

If one looks at Koivunen as a player at a surface level, looking only at the numbers on the back of his hockey card, this extension feels ill-advised.

Koivunen is a winger without obvious athletic or size-related advantages who scored just seven points in 39 games during the 2025-26 season. Some of that was due to poor puck luck, but the reality is players whose career totals include just two NHL goals and less than 50 NHL games typically don’t receive a $4MM annual guarantee over an eight-year term.

With that said, it needs to be stressed that the Pittsburgh Penguins’ hockey operations department, led by Kyle Dubas, is among the NHL front offices least likely to view a player’s value through that narrow, more traditional lens.

Taking a more expanded view, one can at least see some logic to the Penguins’ decision. There is a huge amount of risk here, that needs to be stressed, but looking at the bigger picture of Koivunen’s career, it becomes a little clearer as to why the Penguins have rolled the dice in this way.

First and foremost, there the matter of looming rules changes. Next month, the new CBA’s rules on contract lengths will prohibit deals of an eight-year term. If the Penguins wanted to lock up Koivunen through the rest of his 20’s, this was their opportunity to do so. They could not wait.

Additionally, while Koivunen has not been able to produce in the NHL to this point in his career, he has been an exceptional scorer at lower levels of the game. For Pittsburgh’s AHL affiliate, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, Koivunen has scored 97 points in 97 games. With Kärpät in Finland’s Liiga, Koivunen scored 22 goals and 56 points in 59 regular-season games, and 13 points in 12 postseason contests, all done at the age of 20. For Koivunen to have that kind of season, at that age, in a league that typically does not feature nearly as many point-per-game scorers as the NHL, was extremely impressive.

Koivunen’s ability to stack points at lower levels and drive offense is what made him a top prospect, and one of the key names the Penguins received from the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2024 Jake Guentzel trade.

In fact, it feels as though the Hurricanes have an outsized influence on this deal. The team’s hockey operations department, led by GM Eric Tulsky, is considered to be among the game’s most progressive and analytically-inclined. The Hurricanes have been completely unafraid to behave in an unorthodox manner as they’ve gone about building their team, and it’s tough to say their approach hasn’t paid off, as they’ve consistently made deep playoff runs and are now the reigning Stanley Cup champions.

The Hurricanes’ style of thinking has clearly influenced this contract. Carolina has been known to prefer to extend its players as early as possible, for as long as possible. That front office has reasoned that if they can correctly identify which players will emerge as core talents, paying them early and for as long as possible will maximize the amount of surplus value that can be generated.

If a player is locked into a long-term contract before he fully realizes his potential in the NHL, he could end up playing prime years of his career on a contract worth as little as half of what he might make on the open market.

Carolina has fully adopted that approach, and has been unafraid to raise some eyebrows with their signings. A year ago, they inked forward Jackson Blake to an eight-year, $5.1MM AAV contract. Some questioned the risk the Hurricanes were taking by making what seemed like such a substantial financial commitment to a player with just one season of NHL experience, and just 34 points to his name. But the Hurricanes appeared convinced Blake had a lot more runway to grow as an NHL contributor.

Their projections have, thus far, proven to be correct. Blake scored 22 goals and 53 points as sophomore player and added 20 points in 19 playoff games. His efforts in the postseason helped drive the Hurricanes to a Stanley Cup championship.

Even if Blake stunningly falls apart as an NHL player, it would be a surprise if anyone in Carolina regrets the signing. The more likely outcome, though, is that Blake continues to develop, and his $5.1MM AAV becomes one of the biggest bargains in the NHL.

It’s not just Blake that the Hurricanes have signed with such an approach. Carolina has also found success extending players such as Logan Stankoven, K’Andre Miller, and Seth Jarvis to deals that may have seemed a little too long, or a little too rich, at the time of signing. Now, the long-term nature of those deals appear to be what makes them so immensely valuable.

That’s not to say Carolina has been perfect when making these kinds of gambles – their roll of the dice on 2018 No. 3 pick Jesperi Kotkaniemi stands out in that sense – but their batting average is pretty high. As a result, when a player such as Kotkaniemi fails to live up to his cap hit, it’s something the team can absorb, because of the surplus value they are receiving through players such as Blake, Stankoven, Miller, and Jarvis.

It’s essential to bring up Carolina’s way of doing business, because it’s impossible to separate the Koivunen signing from the wider trend of deals like it. The NHL, like most sports leagues, is one where teams attempt to duplicate the methods of the most successful franchises. It appears Pittsburgh has taken that approach with Koivunen, but it’s important to stress some differences between Koivunen’s case and the case of those Carolina players that were mentioned.

In Carolina, each player the team signed had at least some track record of production in the NHL. In some cases, such as Blake’s, it was lighter than others. But in every case, the players had at least proved themselves as middle-six scorers in the NHL. There was a real baseline the team knew it could expect.

As of right now, it does not feel the absolute baseline for Koivunen is extremely high. As previously mentioned, he has not yet even fully established himself as a full-time NHL player. If he does eventually claim a spot in Pittsburgh’s top-nine, or even top-six, this deal could yield an immense amount of surplus value. But if he continues to struggle at the top level, the Penguins could be left with an anchor of a contract, a third-line cap hit for a player who can’t even hold down a regular NHL role.

NHL history is littered with examples of skilled forwards who were prolific scorers at lower levels, but couldn’t put it together in the NHL. The list of those names is quite long. Because of this signing, it now becomes crucial for the efficiency of the Penguins’ salary cap structure that Koivunen does not end up another name on that list.

One can accept the vision of what the Penguins are trying to accomplish with this deal, but the risk present in this deal might be too high for many to stomach. But even if that is the case, and one views this deal as too risky, one should also at least concede that the Penguins are behaving proactively, and decisively in order to try to create real long-term value.

We won’t know whether their gamble will pay off for some time. But for a team now eight years removed from its last playoff series win, maybe some confident, decisive risk-taking is exactly what is needed.