On the first day of training camp last season, no one really knew how the Pittsburgh Penguins were going to configure their blueline. Take this preview from last September on the eve of camp:
How does the defense sort out?
To put it charitably, there’s a lot of question marks. To put it less diplomatically, this group is looking like an outright weakness at the NHL level based on talent level no matter how it sorts out. There are way too many right shot defenders and while there are plenty of warm
left handed bodies, there are more questions than sure things.
Since it doesn’t look like an Erik Karlsson trade is coming, he’ll be a staple that can play 23+ minutes and carry the mail in a huge role. Who his partner will be is much less certain. Will Ryan Graves get a shot? Could it be Owen Pickering’s time? Do the Pens get crazy and move a right shot player like Kris Letang, Matt Dumba or Connor Clifton to their off-side? The possibilities are many, the quality options are few. If you can even say there’s any at all.
Little did we know that Parker Wotherspoon would go a long way to nailing down stability at the top of the lineup since it wasn’t even mentioned. Wotherspoon was placed on Erik Karlsson’s left side on the first day of camp and never looked back, holding down the spot all season.
Amazingly, just about everything written above for last year still applies again almost 12 months later in preparation for 2026 training camp. Some of the names have changed — Connor Clifton and Matt Dumba are gone (as are Shea and Wotherspoon) — and no one can even to pretend to expect that much out of Ryan Graves any more, but otherwise it’s right back in the same uncertain spot. The Penguins have some new pieces, none of them particularly seem to fit in all that well and the blueline as a whole will likely be a major weakness again after finishing in the bottom-10 (or worse) in just about any metric you can find from last year.
Beyond that, once again in mid-September Karlsson is going to need a new partner. Just who specifically will it be? That’s a lot hazier to determine. There’s no shortage of options, but much like last season, there might not be outwardly that many good options either.
Trevor van Riemsdyk
van Riemsdyk has a lot of experience in recent years playing with Jakub Chychryn and Rasmus Sandin. Both of those offensive defensemen, however, are left handed and van Riemsdyk is a righty. van Riemsdyk has received a little more publicity across the internet for playing off-hand a bit more than he’s practiced it lately, but for everything besides the fact it would require two right shots on the same pair, a lot makes sense. van Riemsdyk has done well in a matchup role in his past, and the Penguins gave a 35-year old a decent salary and two-year contract when they haven’t been doing that lately, surely they have some plan up their sleeves to add TvR despite having Karlsson, Kris Letang, Kaeden Korczak (and Harrison Brunicke) already in the organization as right shot players when they signed van Riemsdyk.
However, that’s a big hurdle to overcome to create a regular, full-time pair (and a first pair at that) to deal with the inopportune nature of two right shots. The desired role for van Riemsdyk could easily not include being envisioned as a righty-righty first pair with Karlsson. But, in the summer at least, it’s an interesting point to ponder.
Declan Carlile
The Pens have directly called Carlile a replacement for Ryan Shea. Shea did not play very often with Karlsson, so that could be a spot against him. However, the left side of the lineup makes Carlile into at least a contender for the job of playing with Karlsson.
So too does Karlsson’s history. Here’s a list of players who Karlsson has played a majority of 5v5 minutes with since 2021:
- Jake Middleton, as a 26-year old with 14 NHL games under his belt to that point
- Jaycob Megna, a fringe NHL/AHL journeyman
- Marcus Petterson, until he was traded mid-season and then it was Ryan Graves
- Matt Grelczyk
- Wotherspoon
That’s not exactly a who’s who of front-line, top pair caliber players beyond Pettersson, yet Karlsson has been called on to make it work and elevate his partner. Could Carlile be next on the list? If the Pens want to keep Karlsson with a left handed player, Carlile is as reasonable a candidate as anyone else. Unless..
Sam Girard
Maybe this shouldn’t be over-thought: Girard is the best LHD on the team, Karlsson is the best RHD. The simple solution would be to join that together. Girard has prior experience of playing with a star-caliber partner in Cale Makar back in Colorado (though it was many moons ago). Style-wise this may be asking for danger since neither are strong defensively. Using Girard on the top pair also could have a trickle-down effect of making the second pair weaker in its puck moving components, which might make the juice not worth the squeeze for overall effects. But Girard and Kris Letang didn’t set the world on fire as a pairing, so if Pittsburgh wants an LD and one with more of a resume than Carlile, Girard suddenly becomes the obvious choice.
An unknown
A classic catch-all of ‘the field’ applies too. Maybe Pickering gets a look? Caleb Jones will be back from his injuries and doesn’t profile terribly much differently from Carlile. Ilya Solovyov is around. A different right shot than van Riemsdyk like Kris Letang or Kaeden Korczak could technically be an option. There’s always the unlikely event that a true top pair left handed defenseman still gets added to the roster, but those don’t tend to drop down from the clouds just before a season starts. Perhaps there could be a PTO in the mix, though such a key spot in the roster should carry a little more weight than a tryout player.
—
There are decent enough cases to go in a lot of different directions, combined with some valid reasons to look somewhere else for each one. Which way the Pens will go with this is a juicy lingering question without a very obvious solution in the moment. One of the first things for training camp will be to see who is skating alongside Karlsson and then watching for how long that group will be able to coalesce and stay together.
