Empoleon8771
Registered User
Josh Yohe was interviewing Rutherford and GMJR made some interesting quotes that make you think that the Penguins may be shopping Rust for a LW.
Rutherford plans on signing some of his team’s restricted free agents — Oleksiak and Sheahan are the most prominent among them — but can’t guarantee signing all of them.
“We’ll see,” he said. “We have to be careful. We can’t put ourselves in a position where we have too much money locked up. We don’t want to lose a player that we want to keep in the next couple of years.”
The Penguins have 5 RFAs who spent a majority of the time on the roster last year in Rust, Oleksiak, Sheahan, Simon and Kuhnhackl. Simon and Kuhnhackl aren't going to be getting any sort of raises and Oleksiak and Sheahan were mentioned as priorities to re-sign, which leaves Rust. Rust is also really the only guy looking at a significant pay raise. Considering the Penguins re-signed Hornqvist long term and still have Kessel, you can also read what JR said as he doesn't want to commit too much money to RW.
Following that, Rutherford also mentioned that he wanted to improve the "balance" of their forward group, and you can interpret that to either meaning a balance of LWers and RWers (the Penguins have a horrible imbalance right now towards RW) or skill vs grit. Both of these ideas fit with a recent rumor that the Penguins offered Rust and Simon to Arizona for Domi, since Domi is more skilled (which would be the skilled/grit balancing by trading Rust for him) and Domi plays LW (which is the RW/LW balance).
So basically, it looks like the Penguins may be looking to trade Rust for a LW because they don't want to commit too much money to RW. I don't know if they'd be targeting a skilled LWer like Domi for Rust, but I think you can definitely see the Penguins looking to make that kind of a trade.