DK's Daily Shot of Penguins: A rugged third pair?

0:00Football is back and this is believed. You're home for NFL and college football news and analysis all season long. Now let's start the show. It was after the 2024-25 NHL season. Did I receive information inside the operations at PPG Pain Serena? That the team wanted to go with more of a physical size-based, snarly kind of supplementary defense. Good morning to you. Good. There's day morning. I'm Dan Kovacovich of DKPITSPRG Sports. This is Daily Shot of Penguins. It comes your way right nearly every weekday if you're into football and or baseball.

1:03I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Pirates in the same place that you found this. A collection of the Penguins prospects will embark for Detroit tomorrow after practicing in cranberry. Up there at the Red Wings Place, they're going to participate in a four-team, four-day tournament. That'll also include the host team as well as the Blue Jackets and the Stars. Almost immediately after that, the main training camp is going to get going. I believe this has not been made official, but that'll begin a week from today. I have two reasons to believe that whichever day camp opens, it's going to be really meaningful. One is that last summer, right around this time, the lines and pairings and everything else that Dan Mews went with that day, that very first day, they really stuck. They had some glue to them.

2:08The other reason is that this training camp and preseason is going to be so fast that you really can't afford to do all the mixing and matching that coaches have done in the past. We're talking two total weeks for the whole thing, and then September 30, your in Philadelphia, for the main event. I have all kinds of thoughts on the state of the defense corps. Most of them, not all that positive, doubly so when speaking specifically about the left side. But there is one thought that I've had for a while now that I kind of like, and it harkens me back to that information that I got very early in the 2025 offseason. And that kind of went like this. You know you've got Eric Carlson, Chris Latang, and as a prospect, Harrison Brunick on the right side, you've got three players who I don't want to obviously get into comparing enormously different achievement levels between these guys, but they have a similar style.

3:22Let's at least acknowledge that much between Carlson, Latang, and Brunick, you've got three right handed defenseman, whose principal strength over the years been putting up points. No matter what becomes of Brunick moving forward, his principal strength is going to be putting up points. So the thinking that was shared with me was that the team would then look at the left side for some balance, you know, get some guys there who would just defend, and this was mentioned at the time as well. Clear the front of the net. That was a sore spot for management at that time. So Ryan Shagged retained for another year, Parker Wather Spoon comes in seemingly out of nowhere. There was still some hope then for Ryan Graves. And you know, over the course of the full season that followed, it turned out not to be the catastrophe that a lot of people myself very much included had forecast.

4:25They weren't great over there, but they weren't terrible. What they still didn't have though, what had been shared with me a few months earlier. So I look at this current cast of defenseman, and I look at that same right side essentially. The Carlson and Latang over there, Brunick feels to me like he's getting blocked out. Maybe that's just by design they'd rather see him spend a full professional season in the American league. That's not at all uncommon. They also paid a pretty big price to add Caden Korsak from the Golden Knights. Korsak's right handed. He's tough. He's a little bit younger and fresher than Wather Spoon, the player who was sent to Las Vegas in exchange. For him, he's 6-3-06. His game's almost wholly founded. On the back end, he doesn't put up many points, and yet he was a regular contributor for the Golden Knights all the way through the Stanley Cup final.

5:31Just now, well, he played one game in the final. He'd been a regular by and large up until the final. But he's that guy. Then I look on the left side, the player that I don't see here or read anybody discussing him anywhere. That's Declan Carlyle. He's 26, so he's just a year older. He's also 6-3. Not quite as heavy. He's at 190. And he's a bit of a late bloomer, which is never again a bad thing for the defenseman. You want those guys to have that extra time in such a complicated position in the American League when it's possible. He's also physical, and he's not out there for his offense. 46 NHL games, two goals and two assists to go with his plus eight rating. But with his being left handed, Korsak being right handed.

6:32Maybe just maybe if they're paired, if they're out there together, you could see this concept finally finding some fruit. And you know, it kind of makes sense. No matter what you do on left defense, and most of the alternatives aren't that attractive. No matter what you do over there, you can still set these two players up as your third pairing. And you can tell them, listen, we believe in you, we're going to put you out there in the final minute of a game. We're going to put you out there on a penalty kill. We want you guys to be really defensive anchors for us. And from there, however, the other two spots on left defense work out, I could see Sam Gerard staying with Latang, for example, that it'd be on the second pairing. And I could see Trevor Van Riemstike, even though he'd be on his off side working with Carlson so long as the two of them have a full camp to try to develop some kind of chemistry.

7:40And everybody else can just fight for whatever positions might be available, assuming that any actually are. I just this to me seems like a good idea. More so, even when one ways that this team wasn't all that great defensively, they weren't. They gave up a few too many odd man breaks. Just a thought, when we come back, J1Q. Today's J1Q comes from John up in Erie. Says DK, the fact that Sidney Crosby keeps playing in Pittsburgh for an $8.7 million salary means he obviously loves the city and the team. I'm amazed when I see athletes such as Tarek, Scubal and Freddie Freeman become so emotional after they left their long time teams.

8:43They could have stayed on those teams if they wanted. Jake Gansel could have stayed in Pittsburgh if he wanted to do a few more millions of dollars mean that much to these guys. Apparently not to Sid. Is it the agents convincing these guys to sign for the most money? Is it the players union? Hey DK, would you leave Pittsburgh if Raleigh or South Florida offered you more money? John, I could take this response a completely different direction by just focusing on the last question that you asked. I could never leave this city. I've actually turned down many an opportunity just to interview for positions elsewhere and notably positions that some would see as being more prestigious than staying here. I'm not humanly capable of leaving this city. I just could never do it. There's nothing that's worth a broken heart. But also unrelated, I'm not sure if you're implying that Raleigh or anywhere in South Florida would be a better place to live than Pittsburgh, in which case he likes.

9:49No. But to your hockey component, I probably should begin and end this answer by just repeating the answer. Repeating for the gazillionth time that Sid is one of one, I don't apply my expectations for any other athlete or person or any component to a personality that Sid has to somebody else. I just said, but taking that further, I don't ever begrudge athletes for attempting to take the fullest advantage of the collective bargaining agreement in which they play. They've earned this. They are entitled to half of all the revenues. This is in the salary cap leagues that their respective sport produces. Sometimes in the circumstances that develop, they have to go somewhere else to get fair value in parentheses. Here, I know I am not at all talking about the two Dodgers that you cited or anything that's related to the Dodgers who have done things that either border on criminal or are actually criminal to boost their own payroll and parentheses.

11:11You mentioned Jake, and that's still a touchy subject around here and it should be for a while. That was a trade that never really needed to happen. That wasn't on Jake. And I reported this at the time, and I'll report it today on the 10th of September in 2026 all over again. Kyle Dubas never meaningfully engaged the Gensel camp toward an extension. He instead let Jake know, saying, going to happen. I'll further remind John, because of the way you worded this, that Jake didn't walk as a free agent. Jake was traded. And it was only after he was traded and he was playing for some other team that he ultimately ended up signing as a free agent with the lightning. To a contract, by the way, that the penguins could still afford and could have afforded throughout. But hey, at least they got next to nothing in the exchange. I digress. It's a combination to answer your main questions of your agents, your union, your peers, guys in the locker room talk about this stuff.

12:22They sure don't do it when there are cameras and microphones, but they do it. Who's getting this? Who's getting that? What are you going to do when your time is up? What are you going to do when you enter your lame duck here? Agents always, always, always press their clients to sign for more money. Ultimate example of that is Pat Berson, SIDS agent, yet again. About a month ago, spouting off to some Canadian media. About how SID deserves to be paid more. Of course SID deserves to be paid more. SIDS the one that's... He's the one that says yes to this. Figure 18 years in a row, I should add. The union has its own way of pushing. Sometimes it's through pushing agents, sometimes it's going to the players themselves. And if you want to know the truth, if I were those agents or I were the union, I would point to SID as an example of why you shouldn't be all that loyal to a city or a team. Because the penguins aren't spending up to the salary cap. The way they once did, the penguins traded away GENCIL.

13:28When it was SID, who was giving them the financial flexibility to keep GENCIL. So yeah, you can see what I meant when I said SIDS one of one. I appreciate. The question, John, I appreciate everybody who listens to daily shot of penguins. We're going to have a double shot of penguins coming your way as well. That'll be today at 4.30pm Eastern Time. It'll be live on our YouTube channel. And I'd love to have you along for that one as well.