Penguins acquire forward Kevin Hayes, 2025 second-round draft pick from Blues

LAS VEGAS — On Friday, Pittsburgh Penguins president of hockey operations Kyle Dubas professed a clarion call to make his team younger.

On Saturday, Dubas traded for a 32-year-old center whose best — or most productive hockey — is likely in the rearview mirror.

The Penguins acquired Kevin Hayes and a second-round selection in the 2025 NHL Draft from the St. Louis Blues in exchange for future considerations.

Per Cap Friendly, Hayes is entering the sixth year of a seven-year contract with a salary cap hit of $7,142,857. The final four years of the deal contain a modified no-trade clause that allows Hayes to submit a list of 12 teams to which he would not accept a trade.

Per the conditions of a 2023 trade, the Philadelphia Flyers are retraining 50% ($3,571,428) of Hayes’ salary for the remainder of the contract.

Hayes, 32, appeared in 79 games last season primarily as a center and scored 29 points (13 goals, 16 assists) while averaging 14 minutes, 28 seconds of ice time.

St. Louis goal!

Scored by Kevin Hayes with 17:49 remaining in the 2nd period.

St. Louis: 3
Detroit: 2#DETvsSTL #STLBlues #LGRW pic.twitter.com/pVuaEVLuZl

— NHL Goals (@nhl_goal_bot) December 13, 2023

A 10-year veteran who was selected as an All-Star in 2023, Hayes also has played for the New York Rangers and Winnipeg Jets.

A request to speak with Dubas on Saturday following the trade was declined.

On Friday, when discussing a potential contract extension for franchise pillar Sidney Crosby, Dubas professed a directive to add younger assets around Crosby.

“As long as you have someone like Sid on the team and the players that we have, the process that we have to follow — as urgently as possible — is acquire younger, hungrier players that can help us to get back to (being a contender),” Dubas said. “The real goal is to try to take where we’re at and the era that the team has just been through … and to be able to hand that over to the next era. But we have to build that era up.”

Hayes was apparently not in the plans for future eras of his previous two employers, the Flyers and Blues.

The Flyers, who signed Hayes to his current contract in 2019, were so eager to unburden themselves from that deal that they retained half of his salary when he was traded to the Blues in June 2023.

As for the Blues, they were willing to part with a fairly high draft pick in 2025 without receiving anything tangible in return (for the moment) to unload Hayes.

Blues president of hockey operations Doug Armstrong, who traded for Hayes last summer, issued a mea culpa when explaining things on his end.

“This is just a situation where it wasn’t working,” Armstrong said. “I made a decision a year ago that I thought it could work for three years, and as the year progressed it didn’t look like it was working for either side. But when you put it down on paper, it wasn’t a shining moment for myself.”

In all reality, the second-round pick might have been the Penguins’ primary pursuit and would be congruent with Dubas’ designs of adding younger assets.

But in the immediate sense, the deal drops the Penguins’ available salary cap space to $7,174,229, according to Cap Friendly, as the opening of the free agent signing period begins Monday.

In one sense, Hayes did make the Penguins younger among their established NHL centers on the roster, albeit incrementally and in a fashion that illustrates how mature the team is at the moment.

At 32 years and 52 days, he is younger than incumbent NHL centers Noel Acciari (32 days, 211 days), Lars Eller (35), Crosby (36) and Evgeni Malkin (37).

Hayes’ addition also aligns with one matter Dubas discussed Friday. He does not plan to pursue long-term free agent signings Monday. Such a maneuver all but eliminates any potential for such additions barring any further transactions.

“We’re going to try to get established guys on shorter-term deals and come in and try to help. That’ll be up to us to select the right players there. But for me, the major focus is trying to bring in players that are younger, hungrier, that can be with our club for a long time and help us long-term.”