Penguins A to Z: Jordy Bellerive is a remarkable story but can he be an NHL player?
With the Penguins’ 2021-22 season coming to a quick ending in the first round of the playoffs, the Tribune-Review will offer Penguins A to Z, a player-by-player look at all 54 individuals signed to an NHL contract — including those whose deals do not begin until the 2022-23 season — with the organization, from mid-level prospect Niclas Almari to top-six winger Jason Zucker.
Jordy Bellerive
Position: Center
Shoots: Left
Age: 23
Height: 5-foot-10
Weight: 194 pounds
2021-22 AHL statistics: 72 games, 29 points (eight goals, 21 assists)
Contract: In the final year of a three-year contract with a salary cap hit of $733,333. Pending restricted free agent this upcoming offseason.
Acquired: Undrafted free agent signing, Sept. 16, 2017.
Last season: No matter what Jordy Bellerive accomplishes in professional hockey, his story will always have the same lead.
And it’s nothing short of remarkable.
In June of 2018, Bellerive suffered significant burns on his body when a bonfire flashed on him while at a friend’s home in Alberta. Bellerive’s injuries were so severe, that he required a handful of weeks of hospitalization to recover then jumped into his offseason training.
Three years and change later, he was named as an alternate captain of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins this past October.
A member of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins for parts of four seasons, Bellerive enjoyed his most complete season thus far in Northeast Pennsylvania during the 2021-22 campaign, appearing in 72 of a potential 76 games. That frequent deployment allowed him to set a career-high with a team-leading 112 penalty minutes.
Bellerive’s willingness to engage physically — and, perhaps more appropriately, his bravery — was on full display during a 4-3 home loss to the Hartford Wolf Pack on Nov. 7. After Penguins rookie forward Nathan Legare was dropped by 6-foot-7, 230-pound Wolf Pack forward Austin Rueschhoff, the compact Bellerive immediately challenged the towering Rueschhoff to a fight.
Offensively, Bellerive’s base numbers during the regular season took a step back considering he had 18 points (10 goals, eight assists) in only 29 games during the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 campaign. But as a bottom-six center, Bellerive isn’t expected to carry a great deal of the freight.
Appearing in all six of Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s postseason games, Bellerive recorded one assist.
The future: Bellerive is a restricted free agent so it’s safe to assume the team will likely extend him a qualifying offer and bring him back on a deal in the neighborhood of a one-year, two-way contract.
While he was signed under previous management back in 2017, current management seems happy with Bellerive, to a certain extent. That’s to say he has progressed from being a prolific scorer at the junior level to a sturdy bottom-six forward in the American Hockey League at a satisfactory rate.
While he has fully embraced the blue-collar duties that role demands and offers a measure of physicality that some members of Penguins management profess to prefer, he hasn’t yet taken significant strides to earn even a recall to the NHL level during his professional career. And it hasn’t been for lack of opportunity considering the health woes the Penguins experienced at the center position on the NHL roster during the 2021-22 season.
Bellerive is a wonderful story. He always will be.
But he still has some work to do in order to become an NHL player.
Seth Rorabaugh is a TribLive reporter covering the Pittsburgh Penguins. A North Huntingdon native, he joined the Trib in 2019 and has covered the Penguins since 2007. He can be reached at srorabaugh@triblive.com.
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