On his Instagram page this week, as he does from time to time, Penguins defenseman Brian Dumoulin recommended a favorite bottle of wine.

The boisterous player who was caught on camera drinking from three beer bottles held in the same hand in the celebration after the clinching of the 2016 Stanley Cup championship is all grown up.

Dumoulin is the fourth-longest-tenured member of the Penguins, trailing only Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang, and there is significance to that ranking beyond merely counting the number of days he has been on the NHL roster.

It also is representative of the respect the 28-year-old Dumoulin is afforded in the locker room.

Winger Bryan Rust has called Dumoulin the most underrated player on the team. Defenseman Marcus Petterson patterns his game after him. Coach Mike Sullivan has lauded Dumoulin’s “day-to-day leadership skills.”

Whether it is correlation or causation is up for debate, but the Penguins’ best stretches this season came with Dumoulin eating up first-pairing minutes, and their worst have come when he was injured.

Holed up at home with his wife and 6-month-old son Brayden during the coronavirus lockdown, Dumoulin is a family man. When the NHL resumes play, three of the top seven defensemen on the Penguins roster will be younger than him.

It is safe to say he has moved into a new stage of his career.

“I don’t know. I still try to be the same person as I was coming in,” Dumoulin said. “I try to be the best teammate I can. Whether they’re young or old, I try to be the same, no matter who they are. We have a great group with a balance of older guys and younger guys. Age-wise, I’m in the middle, but I still feel young and it’s still fun going to the rink every day.

“Having some guys that are younger than you, obviously you try to talk to them as much as you can and just be a great teammate to them because they’re looking at you for leadership and guidance. Just try to be yourself, and that’s what I’ve done.”

Dumoulin played nearly three full seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in the AHL before breaking into the Penguins lineup full time. A lot of work went into Dumoulin becoming the player he is today.

With that in mind, beat writer Seth Rorabaugh and former beat writer Jonathan Bombulie prepared a list of the five players who best developed through Wilkes-Barre/Scranton since the Penguins first parked their top prospects there in 1999.

Bombulie’s top 5

1. Marc-Andre Fleury, goaltender

KDP Studio Former Penguins goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury spent parts of four seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

The 2004-05 lockout came at the perfect time for Fleury. He was a 19-year-old who had made his way to the top spot of the 2003 NHL draft class almost entirely on his off-the-charts athleticism. He had to learn how to play the position like a pro, and that learning process was sometimes ugly. A full season in the NHL at that age might have shattered a teenager. Instead, a 54-game developmental campaign built the foundation for a Hall of Fame career.

2. Brian Dumoulin, defenseman

KDP Studio Penguins defenseman Brian Dumoulin spent parts of three seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

When Dumoulin turned pro as a lanky 21-year-old in 2012, no one was quite sure what kind of defenseman he would become. He was good with the puck but not great. He was good in his own end, but not great. Many people — smart hockey people — thought fellow prospect Scott Harrington might end up being the better pro. Luckily for the Penguins, Toronto didn’t demand Dumoulin rather than Harrington in the Phil Kessel deal. He has systematically become one of the NHL’s most underrated players.

3. Rob Scuderi, defenseman

KDP Studio Former Penguins defenseman Rob Scuderi spent parts of five seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

A fifth-round pick in the 1998 draft, Scuderi is second on Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s all-time games played list with 305. Three-hundred-and-five hard games. Scuderi wasn’t the most physically gifted defenseman, so he made his living blocking shots and battling in front of the net and in the corners. He worked and worked, elbowed his way onto the NHL roster and became a critical piece of the 2009 Stanley Cup team.

4. Tom Kuhnhackl, right winger

KDP Studio Former Penguins forward Tom Kuhnhackl spent parts of four seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

When Kuhnhackl breezed into Wilkes-Barre as a 20-year-old in 2011, he had a 39-goal junior season in his pocket and visions of a lucrative career as a flashy goal scorer in his head. He quickly found out it was much harder to score in the pros. So what did Kuhnhackl do? He committed himself to totally reinventing his game. The transformation was complete when he did the little things — shot blocking, forechecking, penalty killing — that helped the Penguins to back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016-17.

5. Mike Yeo, coach

KDP Studio Before becoming a coach, Mike Yeo was a left winger with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in 1999-2000.  

When Yeo first joined the Penguins organization in 1999, he did so as a player, a minor-league free agent who played with smarts and grit in the bottom six. A balky knee gave out 19 games into the season, and in an era where AHL teams paid little attention to the quality of instruction their prospects received, it just so happened Wilkes-Barre/Scranton didn’t have any assistant coaches. Yeo joined Glenn Patrick’s staff and quickly became known for his incredible work ethic. He broke down the video. He slept on the office couch. He parlayed that into four seasons as a Penguins assistant and NHL head coaching stints with Minnesota and St. Louis.

Rorabaugh’s Top 5

1. Mark Letestu, center

KDP Studio Former Penguins forward Mark Letestu spent parts of four seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

The fact that Letestu even played in the NHL — and is still an active member of the Winnipeg Jets — is a testament to the guidance he received in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in the late 2000s as an undrafted free agent out of Western Michigan. Listed at 5-foot-10 and not blessed with blazing skating ability, Letestu has carved out an 11-year career largely based on guile. Much of that knowledge of the game was imbued in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

2. Matt Murray, goaltender

KDP Studio Penguins goaltender Matt Murray spent parts of three seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

A third-round pick in 2012 who had a solid but hardly spectacular career in juniors, Murray arrived in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton as a mid-level prospect. He departed as one of the best goaltenders in the history of that league by setting a handful of records in 2014-15, including the mark for longest shutout sequence. Under the tutelage of minor league goaltending coach Mike Buckley, who now holds the same position with the NHL club, Murray’s AHL success led to a quick promotion to the NHL, where he helped the Penguins win the Stanley Cup twice.

3. Rob Scuderi, defenseman

KDP Studio In 305 career games with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, defenseman Rob Scuderi had 88 points (eight goals, 80 assists).  

Scuderi took a long road to the NHL, waiting nearly six years to debut in 2004. Before becoming a full-time NHLer in 2005-06, the 1998 fifth-rounder spent four seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and helped that team to the 2004 Calder Cup final. As a positionally sound shot-blocking defenseman in the late 2000s and early 2010s — when that style still had a place in the NHL — Scuderi was a key component to Stanley Cup championships with the Penguins (2009) and the Los Angeles Kings (2012).

4. Conor Sheary, left winger

KDP Studio Penguins forward Conor Sheary spent parts of three seasons with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  

Finding a “winger for Sid” is an idiom that has endured over Sidney Crosby’s decade-and-a-half with the Penguins. If nothing else, it has endured far better than many of the would-be wingers the organization has tried to develop for the Penguins captain. While fairly high draft picks such as Beau Bennett or Daniel Sprong never met their potential, the undrafted Sheary turned an AHL contract into an NHL deal and eventually landed a gig on Crosby’s flank during two Stanley Cup runs. A 20-goal season in 2014-15 under the guidance of Wilkes-Barre/Scranton coach John Hynes allowed him to take those first steps.

5. Tom Kuhnhackl, right winger

KDP Studio In 159 career games with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, forward Tom Kuhnhackl had 59 points (29 goals, 30 assists).  

If this were a list of guys who benefited from development with the ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers, Kuhnhackl, a fourth-round pick in 2010, would be at the top of it. A prolific scorer in juniors, Kuhnhackl had to go to Wheeling — twice —to totally rebuild his game before getting a chance to establish himself in the AHL, let alone in the NHL. Once he proved he could kill penalties and hound opposing scoring wingers in the AHL, he graduated to the NHL and contributed to the Penguins’ two-most recent Stanley Cup championships as well as a surprising New York Islanders team last season.

Jonathan Bombulie is assistant sports editor for the Tribune-Review. You can contact Jonathan at jbombulie@triblive.com or via Twitter @BombulieTrib. Seth Rorabaugh is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Seth by email at srorabaugh@tribweb.com or via Twitter @sethrorabaugh.

Follow the Penguins all season long.

---

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---