Penguins owner says he would give back $15 million to keep Marc-Andre Fleury ‘forever’

The Pittsburgh Penguins lost one of their most beloved players in Marc-Andre Fleury to the Vegas Golden Knights this summer. The veteran goaltender was selected by Vegas in the expansion draft, which came as no surprise after a year full of trade rumors resulting from Matt Murray’s emergence as the Pens’ new starter.

But even with the inevitability of Fleury’s departure — fitting his $5.75 million cap hit onto the books would’ve been challenging for Pittsburgh — it’s clear how much those around the team miss his presence already.

On Wednesday, Penguins owner Ron Burkle said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he would have given up the $15 million expansion fee the team received if it meant being able to keep Fleury.

“I wish we could have given the $15 million [expansion fee] back and kept him forever,” Burkle said.

Unfortunately that was never an option. Each team was required to allow the Golden Knights to select one player who was not protected. Fleury was the choice for Vegas, which will presumably roll him out as the first No. 1 goalie in franchise history.

The Golden Knights paid a $500 million expansion draft fee to join the NHL, which ended up getting distributed in shares to the other 30 clubs. That apparently came out to about $15 million per team, a nice payment for being required to lose a player as part of the expansion draft process.

Except in the case of Burkle, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at $1.49 billion, he’d rather have kept one of the Pens’ most popular players over a payment that won’t have much effect on his fortune.

The problem, of course, is that the salary cap would’ve made this difficult, even if Burkle was willing to throw infinite money at the problem. Fleury has a $5.75 million cap hit for the next two seasons, which is way too much money to pay for a backup goalie. Pittsburgh still has over $10 million in cap space right now, per Cap Friendly, so it wouldn’t have been impossible, but it would’ve been a questionable allocation of limited resources.

If the Golden Knights didn’t pick Fleury, there’s a decent chance the Penguins would’ve traded him elsewhere. And realistically, if the team was desperate enough to retain him, it could’ve offered picks and/or prospects to Vegas in order to have them select someone else. This is a move many other teams pulled to retain certain key players.

But in the end, paying so much money for a No. 2 goalie just wasn’t realistic. Antti Niemi, the replacement for Fleury, is making just $700,000 next season. Now the Penguins have huge flexibility to make upgrades to their forwards and defense that otherwise would’ve been challenging with nearly $10 million locked up in goalies.

So while Burkle’s sentiment is very sweet (and also a reminder that the dude is ridiculously rich), keeping Fleury never really made sense from a hockey perspective. As great a guy as Fleury is — something you hear from teammates, fans, the owners, basically everyone — his time in Pittsburgh had to end.