Penguins reassemble their blue line by adding Jeff Petry, Ty Smith

Ron Hextall knows he can’t keep nine defensemen on his NHL roster.

The Pittsburgh Penguins’ general manager said as much Wednesday.

“We’re certainly not going to have nine on the opening roster,” Hextall said. “I don’t know where that’s all going. Sometimes, you sit around and wait until something moves before you sign a guy.

“I’m not exactly sure where they’ll end up.”

By Saturday, Hextall dealt away two of his incumbent defensemen — John Marino and Mike Matheson — and received two new defensemen — Jeff Petry and Ty Smith — in return, still leaving him with a nonet of blue liners.

He still needs to move someone from the bloated back end, right?

“Not necessarily,” Hextall said Saturday via video conference. “Obviously, we’ll look at everything that comes along as we go. If we can strengthen one area, we’ll certainly look at it. Part of our biggest issue was our (salary) cap situation. It’s a little closer to being compliant now. So certainly feel a little bit better about it now than I did the other day.

“We like our nine defensemen.”

Regardless of who might remain by the time training camp opens in mid-September, the Penguins blue line will look very different than the one that ended the 2021-22 season in May.

Namely, it will display a little more physicality from the likes of Petry and Jan Rutta, a sturdy right-hander they signed from the Tampa Bay Lightning on Wednesday.

“When the season was over, we sat down with the coaches and management staff and talked about our team,” Hextall said. “The one thing that we felt like we wanted to do is get a little bit heavier on the back end. With Petry and Rutta, we felt like we accomplished that.

“The other part, we wanted to improve our transition game a little bit. … Ty Smith is a young player, but we felt like he’s going to give us some puck skill that we felt we wanted to add to our group. Between the two objectives, we felt like we got a little bit of both with these moves.”

Marino was the first player to go Saturday. He was dealt to the New Jersey Devils in exchange for Smith and a third-round pick in 2023.

Capable of playing either side of the blue line, the left-handed Smith, 22, appeared in 66 games last season and scored 20 points (five goals, 15 assists) while averaging 17 minutes, 30 seconds of ice time.

A first-round pick (No. 17 overall) in 2018, Smith enjoyed a promising rookie season in 2020-21 and was named to the NHL All-Rookie Team but struggled in 2021-22 and was a healthy scratch for nine games.

Smith (5-foot-11, 180 pounds) is in the final year of a three-year entry-level contract with a salary cap hit of $833,333. He is scheduled to become a restricted free agent in the 2023 offseason.

“We have high hopes for Ty,” Hextall said. “Obviously, we gave up John Marino for him, who is a very, very good NHL player. Obviously, there’s a little bit of risk on our part there, but we felt pretty good about it.”

Like Smith, Marino showed promise during his rookie campaign of 2019-20 but plateaued a bit over the past two seasons.

Marino, 25, appeared in 81 games this past season and scored 25 points (one goal, 24 assists) while averaging 20:38 of ice time, including 2:21 on the penalty kill.

Former Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford once suggested Marino could end up being the franchise’s top defenseman for upwards of a decade and signed him to a six-year contract extension in January 2021 that carried a salary cap hit of $4.4 million. He will be entering the second year of that contract next season.

After that trade cleared considerable salary cap space, the Penguins dealt Matheson and a fourth-round pick to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for Petry and forward Ryan Poehling.

Petry, 34, had been the subject of trade speculation for several months after the Michigan native had requested a trade for family reasons. Additionally, the Canadiens are in the midst of a rebuild.

A right-handed shot, Petry played in 68 games last season and scored 27 points (six goals, 21 assists) while averaging 22:07 of ice time, including 2:21 on the penalty kill.

Petry (6-3, 209) is entering the second year of a four-year contract that carries a salary cap hit of $6.25 million, now the second-largest figure on the roster (forward Sidney Crosby is at $8.7 million). According to Cap Friendly, Petry’s contract contains a modified no-trade clause that allows him to submit a list of 15 teams to which he would not accept a trade.

A veteran of 12 NHL seasons, Petry has played for the Edmonton Oilers as well as the Canadiens.

During the 2020 postseason staged in a quarantined “bubble” in Toronto, Petry played a large role in the Canadiens’ upset of the Penguins in a qualifying-round series. Petry scored two winning goals as the Canadiens claimed the best-of-five series 3-1.

His addition gives the Penguins five right-handed defensemen.

“When you’re trading for good players, you’re going to have to give up good players,” Hextall said. “Mike is a good player. We certainly valued Mike, but we just feel like Jeff at this point is a little better fit for us. He can play all situations. He can log big minutes. We just felt like right now with our right side with (Kris) Letang and Petry and Rutta is extremely strong. We (also) got Chad (Ruhwedel) and (Mark Friedman) there. So we’re feeling pretty good about our right side. When you’ve got an opportunity to add a player of Jeff Petry’s magnitude, we felt like it was a good fit with our group.”

Poehling is something of a reclamation project. A first-round pick (No. 25 overall) in 2017, the 23-year-old has failed to live up to expectations in his first three NHL seasons.

During the 2021-22 campaign, Poehling appeared in 57 games and scored 17 points (nine goals, eight assists) while averaging 12:12 of ice time.

He also played in seven AHL games with the Laval Rocket and scored six points (three goals, three assists).

A left-handed shot capable of playing center or wing, Poehling (6-2, 196) is entering the second year of a two-year contract with a salary cap hit of $750,000 and is scheduled to become a restricted free agent in the 2023 offseason.

“I can speak for my staff when Ryan was drafted: We really liked him,” Hextall said. “Felt like he’s a big body that is going to get better. Things haven’t gone exactly, I think, the way I don’t think that he would have liked them to go in Montreal there. We’re hoping that sometimes a change can spur a guy on.

“We’re hoping he can be a good two-way player for us. He’s got good size. He plays the middle of the ice. He can also play the wing. We feel pretty good about the acquisition.”

Speaking with media in Quebec, Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes suggested Poehling provides the Penguins with an injection of youth at the center position where Crosby (34), Evgeni Malkin (35) and Jeff Carter (37) are a bit long in the tooth.

“Having Ryan being part of the deal, for them, they felt they need a little depth at center given that their (centers are) certainly older,” Hughes said. “It provides them that security.”

Matheson just completed his second season with the Penguins after being acquired in September 2020 via a trade that sent popular forward Patric Hornqvist to the Florida Panthers.

During the 2021-22 season, the left-handed Matheson, 28, enjoyed a career year, appearing in 74 games and scoring a career-best 11 goals, 20 assists and 31 points while logging 18:48 of ice time per contest.

Matheson (6-2, 188), is entering the fifth year of an eight-year contract that carries a salary cap hit of $4.875 million.

According to Cap Friendly, his contract contains a modified no-trade clause that allows Matheson, a native of Montreal, to submit a list of eight teams he would not accept a trade to.

Before becoming the Canadiens’ general manager, Hughes was a player agent who represented Matheson as well as Letang. Hughes indicated he spoke with Letang for some insight on Matheson’s play last season before executing the trade.

Additionally, Hughes stated in his dealings with the Penguins in constructing the trade for Petry, dealing away Marino was “plan from the get-go.”

If the Penguins’ plan this offseason involves any more trades from their surplus of defensemen, that remains to be seen. Hextall guarded his intentions Saturday far more than he did Wednesday.

According to Cap Friendly, the Penguins have $1,969,825 of salary cap space to work with. They entered Saturday approximately $190,000 over the upper limit of $82.5 million.

“It’s difficult right now because of our salary cap situation,” Hextall said. “I feel pretty comfortable with our group, depth-wise. Again, we don’t have a whole lot of money to spend here under the cap. You always look for things. Our job is to continue to look and see if there’s any areas that we can make our team better.

“Right now, I couldn’t even tell you. There’s a lot of teams that are up against it like us because of the (limited salary cap movement) the last couple of years. Whether there will be a move or not, I really can’t say.”

There almost has to be. Of their top nine defensemen, Smith is the only one who is exempt from waivers for any potential transaction involving Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the American Hockey League.

On the left side, veterans Brian Dumoulin, Marcus Pettersson and prospect P.O Joseph, who just signed a new two-year, one-way contract Tuesday, remain.

Someone out of that group likely will be wearing a different jersey by October.

But who?

“It’s hard to say,” Hextall said. “We’re going to wait until training camp. We’ve got nine competent NHL defensemen. We’ll kind of wait and see how things play out if we go to camp with nine. We feel very good about the depth of it. P.O Joseph, he’s a fourth-year pro this year, and we’ll feel like he’ll be ready to go. We’re excited about Ty Smith. We’ve got Janny Rutta and Chad and (Friedman).

“We’ve got good depth back there for sure.”

Note: Hextall indicated that newly signed forward Josh Archibald, who is one of the relatively few players in the NHL not vaccinated against covid-19, will not have any limitations with regard to crossing the United States-Canada border for games. Previously a member of the Oilers, Archibald received a medical exemption to expedite travel between the two countries for playoff games this past spring.