Almost all signs of Ron Hextall have been removed from Penguins roster

There is almost nobody remaining from Ron Hextall’s two-and-a-half year run as general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Ron Hextall’s reign of error with the Pittsburgh Penguins ended roughly 10 months ago. Less than a full calendar year. Less than a full NHL regular season. The most striking thing about that, aside from how bad those couple of years were, is that today, just 10 months later, there are almost none of his fingerprints still on the Penguins’ NHL roster.

They are, for the most part, completely gone.

This was something I stumbled across the other day when looking at the breakdown of this roster, and it really struck me how quickly almost everybody he acquired was purged from the roster.

For good reason, I might add.

But if you had to take a guess, without looking it up or giving it much thought, how many players on this roster were actually acquired by Hextall and remain left over from his tenure, how many players would you guess?

Five?

Six?

Four?

“A handful?”

The answer is two.

Two players — Rickard Rakell and Jeff Carter. That is all that remains on the NHL roster from Hextall’s tenure with the team.

Now, to be fair, I am not including re-signings in that count. I am looking at who actually acquired each player and brought them into the organization. If you wanted to include re-signings, Hextall’s number would go up to six with the re-signings of Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Bryan Rust and Drew O’Connor.

But in terms of who actually brought each player on the roster into the organization — it’s two.

The table below includes the 29 players that has appeared in at least 10 games this season for the Penguins (so Michael Bunting, another one in the Kyle Dubas category, is not yet included. But when he reaches 10 games that number will go up by one more).

I don’t know why I find this so staggering, but I do.

The guy was running the team at this time a year ago! He was only the GM for two-and-a-half years! He acquired almost 20 players in that time!

Only two of them remain!

That is not to say that the effects of the Hextall era are not still being felt.

Not having Jared McCann because you lost him and Brandon Tanev so you could protect Carter in the expansion draft stings. Every general manager in the league learned their lesson from the Vegas Golden Knights expansion draft and refused to get suckered into giving up too much in the Seattle Kraken expansion draft. Every general manager except for Ron Hextall. A team that can not score goals could really use a 30-goal guy on this team. And if your response to that is, “Well, he wouldn’t have done that here,” my counter to that is, A) you’re probably wrong, and B) if he would not that brings up an entirely different set of concerns that probably need to be addressed.

Trading Mike Matheson, who is having a great season in Montreal, for Jeff Petry stings.

Trading John Marino for a player, Ty Smith, that will not even elevate to “remember a guy” status in 25 years, stings.

Moves like that leave an organization in shambles, and that is to say nothing of the bad contracts in Petry, Mikael Granlund and Jan Ruuta that were left behind.

I give Kyle Dubas a lot of credit for finding a way to unload almost all of them in one trade that was literally an “all of our bad players for your one good player” trade. Even if the Erik Karlsson trade has not gone exactly as planned, it was still a worthwhile swing and I still like it. I will not criticize it no matter how it goes from this point on.

But I also can not ignore that the overwhelming majority if the roster, including the current roster post trade deadline, belongs almost entirely to Dubas.

Of the 29 players that have appeared in at least 10 games this season, 15 were acquired by the new front office (that is 52 percent).

Ten of the 22 players on the active roster are his, and that is not including injured reserve guys Jansen Harkins and Matt Nieto.

This is why I am more critical of him than most at this stage. He purged almost all of Hextall’s failures and replaced them with his guys. Granted, there are some waiver claims in there and spare parts to just fill out a roster, but he presumably liked a lot of these guys enough to acquire and sign them on multi-year deals.

The point isn’t to make this all about Dubas. At least that was not my intention when I sat down and started writing. He is going to have a chance to try and fix Hextall’s mess (and clean up his own) and actually build the complete team and organization he wants.

I just continue to be amazed that Hextall’s fingerprints are almost entirely removed from the roster. When Carter comes off the books on July 1 that will mean only one player (Rakell) from Hextall’s tenure remains. That is a wild overhaul in a short period of time.