Penguins GM Ron Hextall's top priority: Re-signing Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang

Ron Hextall acknowledged two axioms Monday.

First, he wants to re-sign superstar forward Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang.

Second, he doesn’t have a great deal of salary cap space to accomplish that while also filling in other holes on the roster in advance of the 2022-23 season.

Beyond that, the Pittsburgh Penguins general manager was short on specifics during his season-ending media availability Monday in Cranberry.

Any kind of granular details on finding goaltending depth or which of his restricted free agents he’ll re-sign likely won’t be addressed until the futures of Malkin and Letang are resolved.

Both are scheduled to become unrestricted free agents when the NHL opens the free agent signing period July 13.

“We have had discussions very recently, and we’ll continue to have those discussions,” Hextall said. “We would like to sign both players. … They’ve both been here 16 years. (Malkin) has obviously been a great player. Certainly one of the best players in the history of the game. We’d like to keep him as a Pittsburgh Penguin for the rest of his career. In a perfect world, (Malkin) retires a Penguin. I think (Letang is) the same. He’s been here the same amount of time. These two, they’re generational players. They don’t come around very often. We’d like to keep them here through the end of their careers.

“Obviously, we have some issues and areas we have to work through in terms of the salary cap. Everything has got to match up. It’s a puzzle right now. We wish we had more pieces in place to make it a little bit more clear. But it’s hard to even venture to guess where we’ll end up. We’ve got some pieces. … Obviously, the numbers matter. So we’ll continue to work with both guys and hopefully come to agreements with them at some point. I have no timeline, though.”

There is a timeline, however, on Malkin and Letang in terms of age. Malkin will turn 36 in July, and Letang turned 35 in April. If the Penguins re-sign either player to contract extensions, what concerns are there from a standpoint of their trips around the sun?

“What I can tell you is they’re both great athletes,” Hextall said. “They’ve both been here a long time. They’re both performing at a high level right now. We’d certainly like to have them in the mix in September.”

According to Cap Friendly, the Penguins have $23,958,158 of salary cap space to work with to determine who will be part of that mix. In addition to Malkin and Rust, forwards Brian Boyle, Rickard Rakell, Evan Rodrigues, goaltenders Casey DeSmith, Louis Domingue and defenseman Nathan Beaulieu are among the team’s pending unrestricted free agents who finished the season on the NHL roster. Additionally, forwards Danton Heinen, Kasperi Kapanen and goaltender Alex D’Orio are pending restricted free agents.

The statuses of Malkin and Letang will dictate how the rest of the roster takes shape.

“It’s tough when you kind of build from the top and then move your way down,” Hextall said. “So we’ll see where guys like (Letang) and (Malkin) end up. We’ll figure the rest out from there. … There’s a lot of hypotheticals. I’m not trying to evade (the) question, but there’s just a lot of hypotheticals in terms of cap space and what we can add at the different positions.”