Now that the NHL Olympic Break is officially over and the regular season resumes tomorrow, the Colorado Avalanche have made a trade before the trade deadline officially comes up just over a week from now, on March 6. The Avs have traded Samuel Girard and a 2028 second round draft pick to the Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for defenseman Brett Kulak.
Kulak was traded from
the Edmonton Oilers to Pittsburgh earlier this season as part of the Stuart Skinner trade. The 32-year-old defenseman has played 25 games for the Penguins so far, logging seven points in those games so far. At this point in his career, he’s widely considered a depth defenseman, and it’s likely that he’ll slot in either on Colorado’s third pairing or be a 7th defenseman that can enter the lineup here and there when needed.
The fit of Kulak in Colorado made sense, we even included him in our Avalanche trade targets last week especially as Colorado and Pittsburgh have been frequent trade partners recently. The thought of acquiring him for a second round pick would have been steep, to throw in Girard on top of it makes this very much a lopsided trade. With Girard now headed to Pittsburgh, Sam Malinski will likely play more minutes as Girard is not the fail-safe any longer. The last piece of this is that Colorado cleared up some more cap space with this deal.
Kulak is currently on the last year of a four-year deal, with an AAV of $2,750,000. Girard’s AAV on his contract is $5,000,000, with one year remaining so the Avs now have $8,741,926 in cap space with this move, which is obviously the goal moving Girard as a cap dump. That’s a pretty decent amount of cap space to make another move or two before the trade deadline next week, so we’ll see if the Avs have any other moves in the pipeline in the meantime. Given that contenders generally load up on defense the idea is to add to the defensive core, not take from it, therefore another move has to be in the works.
