There was a lot of speculation going into this offseason about what the Golden Knights would do with Marc-Andre Fleury.
Fleury will be 36 years old by the time next season starts. He has two years remaining on a deal with a huge $7 million cap hit. Robin Lehner supplanted Fleury as the No. 1 goaltender in the playoffs, then signed a five-year deal that carries a $5 million cap hit.
Fleury's name was thrown around as a possible buyout candidate, but the Golden Knights' only buyout window of the offseason passed last week without a Fleury buyout. Speculation turned to Fleury as a possible trade candidate, even though most of the goaltending jobs around the league were filled after the long line of goaltending dominoes fell in the opening days of free agency.
Golden Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon put all the talk to rest when speaking with Vegas media on Monday night.
"We see the goaltending position being incredibly important this year," McCrimmon said. "Our goalies will be Robin and Marc-Andre. We all expect a schedule that's going to be extremely compressed. And it's easy for us to talk about it. Everybody expects that. But when you begin to live it, I think that the importance of two goaltenders is really going to be valuable. ... Marc and Robin are going to be our goaltenders as we go into the offseason, into training camp and into the season.”
"When we talked to our pro staff, our pro staff really reiterated how important they felt having the two goalies that we have were going to be to our team and how important they will be this year," McCrimmon added. "All of those inputs went into the discussion. Did we look at any number of possibilities? Sure we did. But this was, at end of the day, the decisions that we made to move forward."
Fleury isn't going anywhere.
Even though some Penguins fans were clamoring for a Fleury return to Pittsburgh when he was rumored to be on the move and Matt Murray was on his way out the door, a return never quite made sense here.
Fleury wasn't bought out, which ruled out the Penguins or any other team potentially signing Fleury to a cheap deal in the offseason. The maximum amount Vegas could have retained in a trade, per the collective bargaining agreement, is 50 percent. Fleury, even at $3.5 million, didn't really make sense for the Penguins. Assigning Casey DeSmith to Wilkes-Barre would leave the Penguins with $3.6 in cap space, just barely enough to fit 50 percent of Fleury's contract, but teams typically try to avoid being that close to the cap to start the season. Vegas is just barely under the cap upper limit themselves, which meant it would have taken a lot of overpayment (likely in picks and prospects, of which the Penguins do not have a surplus) by the Penguins to make that route appealing to Vegas.
A third team could have gotten involved to retain salary to lessen the load for both teams (à la the Derick Brassard deal), but that route would have likely cost a lot in picks and prospects (á la the Derick Brassard deal) to get done, especially with a flat cap next season.
Even if the financials of a Fleury deal made sense, Jim Rutherford more than suggested last week that the plan for next season is a Tristan Jarry-DeSmith tandem.
"I'm comfortable with both of them," Rutherford said of Jarry and DeSmith on Wednesday. "Tristan had an All-Star year. Two seasons ago DeSmith was very good for us - he had good numbers."
Rutherford added that they would "keep an eye on" adding a third goaltender for depth, and then he did just that the following day, signing 27-year-old Maxime Lagace -- who served well as Vegas' No. 3 goaltender in the team's inaugural season -- to a one-year, two-way contract.
That leaves Jarry and DeSmith as the tandem in Pittsburgh, and Lagace in Wilkes-Barre as the No. 3 likely working with young goaltenders Emil Larmi and Alex D'Orio. The two goaltenders the Penguins selected in rounds two and three of the draft -- Joel Blomqvist and Calle Clang -- are both staying in Europe for at least another season.
That's the organization's goalie depth chart heading into the 2020-21 season. There isn't -- and never really was -- room for Fleury.