The Penguins on Friday traded forward Nick Bjugstad to the Wild in exchange for a conditional pick in the 2021 draft, Jim Rutherford announced.
The conditions on the pick, a seventh-rounder, were not released by either team in the trade. The Minnesota Star Tribune's Sarah McLellan reported that the Penguins get the seventh-round pick if Bjugstad either plays in at least 70 games for Minnesota or scores at least 35 points.
The Penguins are retaining a portion of Bjugstad's $4.1 million cap hit for the 2020-21 season, the last year remaining on Bjugstad's current contract. The exact percentage of salary retained is not yet confirmed, but is believed to be 50 percent, or just over $2 million in cap space.
Rutherford still expects the trade to be a cap space-saving move.
“When you look at where the cap is today, we’re like a lot of teams," Rutherford told Dave Molinari of the trade. "We have to make some moves in order to be cap-compliant, so you look at different things and this is one of the players we had a chance to move. We’re happy we could move him to Minnesota. It’s his home. These are the kind of things that a number of teams are going to have to do.”
Given some of the internal third-line center options like Sam Lafferty or Jared McCann (both of which are restricted free agents), it's possible that the sum of the retained salary plus the cap hit of Bjugstad's replacement will still be lower than Bjugstad's $4.1 million cap hit, which makes this a move to be cap-compliant.
"There’s nothing out of our control now that would put us over the cap," Rutherford added. "Up until this point, it was going to be be hard to be cap-compliant. This takes a little bit of pressure off. It doesn’t necessarily put us in a position to do all the things that we want to do, but at least it takes the pressure off, that we know we can control whether we are cap-compliant.”
Had the Penguins opted to buy out Bjugstad instead, the implications would have cost them $600,000 toward the cap in 2020-21 and $1.75 million in 2021-22.
Bjugstad, 28, played just 13 games for the Penguins during the regular season and was unavailable during the playoffs due to injury. Bjugstad had spinal surgery in the offseason and is expected to be healthy by the start of training camp.
“That’s not my concern now, first of all, but I really like Nick and all the medical reports suggest that he’s 100 percent," Rutherford said of Bjugstad's status. "He’s healthy. He’s ready to go. He’s in his contract year. He’s a good player. He’s going back to Minnesota. I think he’s going to have a very good year, and I hope he does. It’s been a few tough years for him here. I’m hoping he can play the way he’s capable and be healthy.“
Bjugstad, even when healthy, never quite lived up to the expectations that came from some of his 40-plus points seasons in Florida before being acquired by the Penguins. After scoring 19 goals and 30 assists in 82 games in his final full year with the Panthers in 2017-18, Bjugstad only scored nine goals and five assists in 32 games in the second half of the 2018-19 season with the Penguins. He scored one goal and one assist in his 13 games this season.
“I think we all did (have higher expectations), but for the most part, it was all related to injuries, whether it was a major injury like the back surgery he just had, or whether it was something more minor that was bothering him, we just couldn’t get him healthy enough to get him in the kind of comfort level that he should have been in," Rutherford said.
The Penguins now own five picks in the 2021 draft -- their own second- and fifth-round picks, their own seventh-round pick, the Wild's seventh-round pick (conditional), and the Ducks' seventh-round pick, acquired in the Erik Gudbranson trade.
Dave Molinari contributed to this report.