The Top 25 countdown continues with the most newsworthy young player in the organization of the moment, the man with an eight year contract Ville Koivunen.
Catch up on the previous entries for this year:
Pensburgh Top 25 Under 25: Graduates and Departed players in 2025 Top 25 Under 25: The best of the rest #25: Chase Pietila, D #24: Ryan Miller, F #23: Finn Harding, D #22: Peyton Kettles, D #21: Zam Plante, F #21: Brady Peddle, D #20: Melvin Fernstrom, F #19: Tanner Howe, F #18: Tomas Galvas, D #17:
Pierce Mbuyi, F #16: Jake Livanavage, D #15: Owen Pickering, D #14: Tristan Broz. F #13: Avery Hayes. F
#12: Ville Koivunen, RW
2024 Ranking: No. 2
Age: 23 (June 13, 2003)
Acquired Via: Trade with CarolinaHurricanes on March 7, 2024
Height/Weight: 6’0”, 172 pounds
Ville Koivunen’s career has contained some contradictory moments so far.
He was a fairly high draft pick of Carolina indicating they liked him…Only to be traded out of the organization before getting going to show they didn’t find him that big in their future.
End up a first full season in North America looking good with seven points in eight games in the NHL…Only to regress back to the AHL after not playing well enough in the NHL the next year.
Getting an eight year contract with a massive cap hit following such an uneven year for an unestablished player might be the biggest contradiction of all. Nothing in Koivunen’s past performance justified a $32 million dollar commitment, but the Penguins gave him one anyways in hopes that his future would be worth it.
Whether or not he lives up to the hype and expectation placed upon him will be one of the more fascinating areas for the Penguins in the upcoming training camp and beyond. Officially, Koivunen will still have to earn his spot on the NHL roster, per Kyle Dubas. Koivunen got a big time NHL contract, yet he still isn’t assured an NHL spot. Another contradiction.
After all these stops and starts, the future for Koivunen appears wide open. Which is an odd thing to say for a player with an eight year contract, though it applies since the Pens have an off ramp built into that contract that might not really make it a long commitment. As almost always with Koivunen’s career, how things appear right now isn’t always how it will remain.
Which, by that logic, could be time for another reversal in a positive direction. There’s some evidence to support an increase in performance for Koivunen, despite the lack of production in 2025-26.
The big x-factor is what is happening right now for Koivunen’s off-season training. It’s another crucial summer for him to make gains physically in order to level him up to where he can be more effective in the NHL, an area that was lacking last year. It goes without saying based on the contract that the Pens have been impressed enough by the willingness to put in the work and show improvement to literally buy into his future.
“Over the course of the [2025-26] season, Ville showed excellent commitment in Wilkes-Barre to doing extra work, and he has doubled down on that this summer,” Dubas said last week. “He did not return to his home in Oulu, instead working to set up a new training program in Helsinki. He then informed us that he would be returning to Pittsburgh in mid-August to join the growing number of players we have training here in the summer. His actions gave us assurance, and our staff will continue to push him on and off the ice.”
According to Dubas, neither the team nor player were satisfied with the missed opportunity from last year that saw Koivunen break camp on the first line with Sidney Crosby, only to slide back down to the AHL for a good chunk of the season (“I think he would be the first to say he didn’t make the most of (his opportunity)” is how Dubas put it”)
Despite that disappointment, Dubas made what he called a “bet” on Koivunen with the eight-year contract. That’s usually not how it goes in the NHL, max term contracts are reserved for sure things, not an experiment. Yet here we are.
To pull back the curtain, Pensburgh had Koivunen ranked for 12th in this year’s Top 25 Under 25 before the contract. After consideration, we elected not to change or improve his placement on our list just because he was given a contract that indicates he will be an important player in the future – or at least be given every opportunity to live up to turning the bet into a winner. It’s difficult to place a player whose semi-realistic potential range of options for less than two months from now swing from being in a fairly significant spot in the Pens NHL lineup down to getting waived and being out of the organization completely. A scenario in the middle (being mostly an NHL scratch for Pittsburgh, going unclaimed on waivers and assigned to AHL Wilkes-Barre) are perhaps even more likely than the extreme options to best/worst case outcomes.
For now and until proven otherwise, Koivunen is what he is as a limited player that can look soft, slow and ineffective at the NHL level, despite starting to get paid like something different. The Penguins have more than plenty of candidates as wingers for their roster and Koivunen may or may not even figure into the NHL team at the start of the season. The good news is he offers some versatility, playing 12 games as a left wing last season and 61 total games at right wing, split between his NHL and AHL time. Like most everything else, this is a player looking to find a fit and where he can make an impact.
His young career has already been fraught with ups, downs mixed with with starts, stops and more reversals than a game of Uno. The near future might not be any less tumultuous, as unpredictable as an unestablished player getting a max length contract out of the blue.
Such is the career of Ville Koivunen. Who can say whether the next twist will be a step forward, in place or backwards, but he certainly is a player the team has put a spotlight on due to the bet they decided to make and seeing whether or not the player will live up to his end of it.
