With the Pirates calling up top prospects Endy Rodriguez and Quinn Priester for last night’s game and their first tastes at the top level, we got to wondering if the Penguins would follow suit with any candidates next season. (Hey, in mid-July you gotta take inspiration where you can get it).
We’ve done this before for the 2020 season, but this year’s exercise goes to show how thin the pipeline is. Decisions made on prospects and draft picks by NHL teams can take a handful of years to translate into NHL readiness, it’s a slow and long pipeline in most cases to turn prospects into NHL players.