The NHL trade deadline is officially two weeks away. We saw Eric Staal get traded across the border on Friday now that the quarantine period is seven days. I anticipate the number of deals will start to pick up. Brian Burke was pretty adamant the Penguins are looking hard at doing something to help the current roster. We also know Burke wants a “physical” player. I think there’s a physical player out west Burke would be very familiar with and who would check a lot of his boxes off.
To be clear I am not advocating for Pittsburgh acquiring this player. I just see a path forward for it happening. The player is Dustin Brown.
He’s a Brian Burke player. He plays with an edge. He’s having a solid goal scoring year, albeit juiced by a high shooting percentage. He’s playing on an up and coming team, but a team not quite yet ready to compete in the playoffs. They might look to move on from their former captain. He isn’t a rental. He makes 5.9M this year and next. He plays right wing where the Penguins could use some help. It is by no means a sure thing the Penguins acquire him, but there are too many threads to pull here to ignore the possibility.
Dustin Brown is having a huge bounce back year after sliding significantly last year. However, a lot of Brown’s success this season can be traced to his shooting percentage of 16.1. His career shooting percentage is a highly respectable 9.9, but not quite what it has been this year. This is the best shooting percentage he has ever had. Brown has 14 goals in only 30 games. Only six of which are at even-strength. The other eight are on the power play. Brown’s quality of teammate has also been juiced up as he is in the 94th percentile among NHL players.
This wouldn’t just be checking off boxes for Brian Burke. Before Ron Hextall was the general manager for the Philadelphia Flyers he was the assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Kings. Brown was he captain of the team that gave Hextall his first ever Stanley Cup. NHL executives love going to the well they know versus the well they don’t.
While Dustin Brown is far from the top of my list of players for the Penguins to go out and acquire he may be a better option than one of the other options being talked about from Southern California. Rickard Rakell is somebody whose name you hear a lot about in trade rumors, but he hasn’t exactly been good the past few years.
This is how he compares to Brown
I used JFresh’s 2021 data from the individual players cards (the ones above) to add in the 2020-21 WAR percentile ranking on the graph here. At worst Brown has been a comparable player to Rakell. At best he has significantly outplayed him including this year.
Is Brown the best option for the Penguins, no. Is he the worst option for the Penguins, no. Should the Penguins try hard to go in a different direction, yes. Will they? You have two executives who probably hold him in high regard, we’ll see.
Thanks for reading!
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