Penguins in no rush to address lack of center depth

The Pittsburgh Penguins have two extremely good centers in Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. What they don’t have is anyone else who looks ready to play the position on a championship-caliber team next season.

After losing their third- and fourth-line centers, Nick Bonino and Matt Cullen, to free agency, the Penguins now look as top-heavy as ever up the middle. The team’s current options at center include Carter Rowney, Scott Wilson, Greg McKegg, and prospect Zach Aston-Reese.

It’s not exactly a group that inspires a ton of confidence compared to Bonino and Cullen, who played key roles on back-to-back Stanley Cup winners. Last season, those two combined for 68 points in the regular season, then added another 16 points in the playoffs.

So you’d think there would be some urgency in Pittsburgh right now to address this situation with the opportunity to three-peat ahead of the team, right? Not quite, as GM Jim Rutherford told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Sam Werner on Thursday.

Despite staring at a likely downgrade from Bonino/Cullen to whatever Pittsburgh can slap together for its bottom six, Rutherford isn’t ready to go make trades before the season to address the situation. He’d rather wait and see what happens during training camp and early in the regular season, then weigh his options with more information at hand.

“[I’m] more comfortable with that than trading for somebody where I’m not sure whether they can help us or not,” Rutherford said.

It’s a bit of a surprising stance for Pittsburgh, which hasn’t been shy about bringing in veterans to try to win while Crosby and Malkin are in their primes. The team has worn thin its prospect pool — ESPN recently ranked the Penguins dead last in its organizational rankings — trying to make sure it’s in a position to win.

Now that’s come back to bite the team to some degree, as a deeper organization could have options in the minor leagues ready to come up to fill those bottom-six roles. Pittsburgh isn’t entirely without options, but it’s hard to see a scenario where the team doesn’t entertain the possibility of a trade during the season.

For now, it sounds like Rowney will open the season as the fourth-line center, so the question is who fills the spot ahead of him.

Some options listed by Werner to address the lack of center depth include moving young winger Jake Guentzel to third-line center or trying a prospect like Aston-Reese, who joined the organization as an undrafted free agent earlier this year. Aston-Reese put up 63 points in 38 games during his senior year at Northeastern in 2016-17, then put up eight points in 10 games during a brief stint with Pittsburgh’s AHL affiliate at the end of the season. He’s got NHL potential, although he’s a big question mark at age 23.

The team could also try to slide over Wilson, who recorded 26 points in 78 games last season as a winger.

Pittsburgh isn’t without options — Rutherford said “there’s a couple of guys I could acquire right now” — but the team also knows that it’s a long hockey season, and changes don’t necessarily need to be made in August. The Penguins won the 2016 Stanley Cup after firing their head coach early in the season, so the team knows it can still make adjustments in those first few weeks and stay on a trajectory to compete for the Cup.

But this is a question mark the Penguins didn’t have last season, and it opens up another area of vulnerability for a team that squeezed by its opponents in the playoffs this year. Having a healthy Kris Letang would surely go a long way toward giving next year’s team a boost in the playoffs, but they’ll still want to make sure they have reliable centers in the bottom six to eat minutes like Bonino and Cullen could.