Ian Cole. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS

Penguins

Kovacevic: Those two trades are about to beget a third

Dec 20, 2017 • 12:00 am

15.7K

Brief and to the Point ...

It couldn't be clearer, at least from this perspective, that Jim Rutherford's innocuous-on-the-surface trades Tuesday were aimed at moving Ian Cole next.

That's not cynical. That's practical.

The Penguins have projected space under the NHL's salary cap of less than $900,000. This is all that matters in the moment, and I can attest that it's the topic within the team's management. As it should be. Because, aside from the proverbial pure hockey move -- similar salary swaps -- Rutherford's flat-out hogtied here.

Which is where Cole comes in, of course:

• He's making $2.1 million. He'll be an unrestricted free agent after this season. He hasn't yet heard the first peep from the Penguins about a possible extension. He already was shopped for a trade in one brief wave a month ago.

Those alone are strong signals he's gone.

• He's part of a blue line that has -- and this is a rarity in the league -- all six players being paid more than $2 million. Four are paid more than $4 million. Two are paid more than $5 million. Kris Letang is at $7.25 million. The top six as a whole cost $25.3 million. All eight currently in the NHL cost $26.9 million, more than a third of the payroll.

That's the fourth-most money committed to defensemen in the league, behind the Jets, Sharks and Red Wings. And it's too much for a team that's got scoring depth as its primary shortcoming.

• Jamie Oleksiak, the veteran behemoth acquired Tuesday from the Stars, is here to supplant Cole. No one will say that, but the writing might as well be on a Mount Washington billboard. He bumps Chad Ruhwedel back down the depth chart, buys a bit of time for Justin Schultz to return and, once Schultz is back, settles into a No. 5 or 6 role in place of Cole or gets bumped himself along the way.

That's what's next. But the question -- no, more of a quandary -- is how Rutherford parlays a rental defenseman, even one as solid as Cole, into the long-elusive third-line center.

Might take another double-move.

• Quick, someone call the Oilers.

• Better yet, someone call Saint Paul. At least once the Wild fall even further out of the playoff picture. I hear there's a guy there who works cheap, works hard, was recently made an insulting healthy scratch and, to boot, was the local Dad of the Year in 2017.

• Apologies for the repeat, but now that it's really pertinent, I've never understood what Mike Sullivan didn't see in Josh Archibald.

Every time Sullivan didn't like what he was seeing from his group, he'd plug in Archibald, and Archibald would do all those things Sullivan wanted from everyone. And in the case of Monday night in Denver, he'd do them very well. But then, he'd go right back up to the press box, as he surely would have later this week had he not been traded.

This isn't to question the trade itself. Trades aren't punitive, nor should they be made when a player is at a low level. But it is to question what kept Archibald from skating for a team -- all along -- that needed so many more Archibalds.

• Another variable that seems seldom mentioned in the Penguins' potentially fading season: The Lightning most definitely look like that one team that's poised to take over the East.

Remember when that was the hot topic back in, oh, August and September?

The Bolts are 24-7-2, have scored 126 goals, have allowed 84, and all three of those figures, remarkably, lead the NHL. That's some seriously rare air in my lifetime. Not to mention having the top two scorers in the league in Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos. and, very likely, the top goaltender in Andrei Vasilevskiy.

No fatigue factor, either. They didn't even make the playoffs this past spring and, on top of that, a ton of their production and energy have come from younger kids like 21-year-old Brayden Point, their No. 3 scorer.

As I told Chris Kunitz in Tampa back in October: He chose well.

• Don't kid yourself: That's the bar now for the Penguins. Not just playing better, but playing better than those guys.

• If about 99 percent of the impartial people watching their favorite sport think it was a catch, and the governing body declares it wasn't a catch, the governing body's got a problem.

• Not everything is as it appears, in life and certainly not in football, where only a small handful of people truly know what's taking place at any given point in a game.

In the 36 hours that have passed since the Steelers' loss to the Patriots, we've learned, among other things that corrected common misperceptions, that Mike Tomlin wasn't the one who called timeout after JuJu Smith-Schuster's 69-yard catch and, in fact, no one on the home team did even though referee extraordinaire Tony Corrente did via assumption.

"During that timeout, I called Tony over and said, ‘Why did you award that timeout? The timeouts are supposed to come from the bench.’ " Tomlin said Tuesday. "He said that the timeout request came from Ben. I said, ‘I was looking at Ben. Ben was signaling timeout, but he wasn’t signaling timeout at you. He was signaling timeout at me trying to get confirmation on what we wanted to do.’ So those things happen during the course of play. There’s a lot going on. We were still given an opportunity to win the football game. Definitely not crying over spilled milk."

Crazy stuff.

We also definitively learned, from Ben Roethlisberger himself, that the Steelers had only one play called following the non-catch. That's stupid stuff. Indefensible given all the time the Steelers had during the delay to overturn the touchdown.

That ending might never end.

• Cam Heyward's absurd omission from the Pro Bowl brings to mind another change the NFL needs to make.

The Jaguars' Caleis Campbell (14.5), the Chargers' Joey Bosa (11.5), and the Raiders' Khalil Mack (10.5) all had more sacks than Heyward's 10. But all three play in a 4-3 defense on the outside, making them essentially edge rushers. It's a different world.

Heyward, an interior lineman in a 3-4, just became his franchise's first defensive lineman since Keith Willis in 1986 to hit double-digits in sacks. And he's done that while also being hugely responsible for other facets in the middle and in facing bigger beef on the way to the quarterback.

He'll make it anyway. Others will always drop out. But the point going forward should be that 3-4 linemen are weighed a little differently and, thus, fairly. Or just recognize it to the degree that another defensive end can be chosen.

• The Steelers will beat the Texans and Browns, and they'll clinch a bye through the first round of the playoffs.

That's not a prediction. That's common sense.

Narratives don't die easily, but they've now beaten nine of the past 10 sub-.500 teams they've faced on the road, and the one in Houston won't be an exception. I could get all deep about that, but the Texans just got bombed by the Jaguars, 45-7, and third-string quarterback T.J. Yates completed 12 of 31 passes in that game.

Think about that. Poor Bill O'Brien, who's had nothing but QB catastrophes since leaving Penn State, could pluck a person off the street, blindfold them, twist them around 10 times before lining up behind center ... and they could still complete 12 of 31 passes.

• For all of Blake Bortles' shortcomings on offense, the Jaguars are a virtual lock to enter the AFC playoff bracket with the best defense of any qualifier. They're currently No. 3 in the NFL in total yardage, No. 1 in points allowed at an amazing 14.9.

As such, they're capable of beating either the Steelers or the Patriots -- heck, they already did that once at Heinz Field -- and don't deserve to be dismissed from the AFC Championship Game conversation, as they often are.

The crowd at PNC Park for a Tuesday night game in early September. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS

• Major League Baseball will pass out $50 million checks to each of its 30 franchises next spring, related to the recent sale of the highly lucrative MLB Advanced Media's BAMTech spinoff to the Disney corporation. I'd heard it was coming, but this past week saw the first word of when. And other reports describe the check as possibly being as high as $68 million.

The Pirates' payroll will remain roughly the same as last year or go lower.

I no longer need opinions to describe any of this.

• Bob Nutting failed to show up at PiratesFest, the only offseason gathering of the franchise's fan base. It was held, conveniently enough, right inside PNC Park, not far from his office. It was held, conveniently enough, in the first week of December when there's no baseball activity of any kind.

He owns the franchise.

What could have been more important?

This is not the same Nutting I'd known. Not at all. A lot's changed. And the reaction to it, by and large, has been to either hunker down or hide.

• Neal Huntington spoke the following to reporters last week at the Winter Meetings in Florida, and it's worth parsing: “With respect to postseason odds, I don’t think our odds were very good in ’13, ’14 or ’15. In fact, I think our best odds were going into the ’16 season, so we want to be respectful of what the projections are. Ultimately, we’re going to look internally and how do we feel we will compete. Who are the players we feel will succeed? Who are the players we feel have a chance to bounce back, and where do we think that puts us within our division? Most importantly, we have to take care of our business.”

One of his planning factors as a general manager is "where do we think that puts us within our division?" The context is whether or not the Pirates should reload or retool, a phrase that's already been used many times this offseason as a euphemism for whether or not they should sell off their most expensive talent.

He wants to see "where do we think that puts us in our division?" Presumably because, if the division has a couple of good teams, the one he's assembled over a decade in charge can't compete? Because that's the message the leader of baseball operations thinks is smart to send either internally or externally? Because he's looking for an easy kick-the-can-down-the-road escape hatch that buys a few more years of a -- let's call it by the real term -- rebuild?

Four more years, my friends. Four. More.

WHAT'S BREWING

• Our Christmas gift subscriptions are here! Buy one! This is a big, big time of year for us, and we've got a loooooooooooong way to to go reach 1,000! That's not some arbitrary goal, either. We budget for that many, and we'd love to be able to hit it like we did last year.

Thanks to everyone who's already bought one or more!

• Our site's been blessed with some exemplary work over the years. But this morning, Matt Gajtka and Matt Sunday have a wonderful Midweek Reader that's one of the best pieces we'll ever run. They traveled to Ohio to meet with Pittsburgh's own Ryan Malone, who's attempting a comeback like no other. Must-must-read.

• I'm hosting a full three-hour radio show today, 3-6 p.m., on 105.9 the X in place of Mark Madden. Lance Lysowski, Christopher Carter and Gajtka will join me in studio. This will be fun.

• Today is early signing day for college football. We'll keep separate live files on Pitt and Penn State beginning, oh, around sunrise.

VIDEO

Lance and I went old-school Java on Steelers, Penguins and Pirates, this right after our every-other-Tuesday staff meeting in the offices: