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PITTSBURGH — Jim Rutherford spent his first nine months on the job as Pittsburgh Penguins general manager reassembling the team around franchise cornerstones Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
The final touches brought back a familiar face.
Pittsburgh acquired defensemen Ben Lovejoy from Anaheim and Ian Cole from St. Louis on Monday, hoping the veterans provide for a group that is starting to round into form with a quarter of the regular season remaining.
“To have a good run in the playoffs you need experience and that’s what we’ve done here,” Rutherford said.
The 31-year-old Lovejoy returns to the Penguins after spending two-plus seasons with the Ducks. Shipped out west for a fifth-round pick in 2012, Lovejoy comes back to his original NHL team with a steadier hand and a knack for marking the smart play if not always the spectacular one.
It’s why Rutherford didn’t mind parting with 23-year-old defenseman Simon Despres to bring Lovejoy home. Despres led Pittsburgh with 184 hits but also struggled with responsible play. That won’t be an issue with Lovejoy, who has one goal and 10 assists in 40 games with Anaheim this season and the thick skin developed from 20 playoff games for the Ducks over the last two seasons.
“He’s really blossomed,” Rutherford said. “He’s developed into a solid consistent defender. Our guys felt very strong about reacquiring this player.”
Pittsburgh sent Robert Bortuzzo and a seventh-round pick in the 2016 draft to the Blues in exchange for Cole. The 26-year-old Cole has four goals and five assists in 54 games for St. Louis this season. Cole’s plus-16 plus/minus ratio ranked third on the team at the time of the trade even though he was only an intermittent presence in the St. Louis lineup.
While neither Lovejoy or Cole play with quite the same physicality as Despres or Bortuzzo — whose 68 penalty minutes were second on the team — he doesn’t see that as an issue when the calendar flips to the postseason.
“Clearly the two guys we traded may be a more little aggressive on the fighting side than the two guys we got back,” Rutherford said. “There will be a few that we play in the regular season that we’ll need that. We’ll have to do that as a unit … but when you get to the playoffs, it’s not as useful.”
Flyers make 2 deadline trades
The Flyers picked a good time to be a stumbling hockey team.
If they had been entrenched in a playoff spot, first-year general manager Ron Hextall may have been a buyer — in a seller’s market.
Instead, Hextall made his second move before Monday’s trade deadline that conjured memories of the most successful general manager in Flyers history.
It was the late Keith “The Thief” Allen whose shrewd moves helped build the Flyers into Stanley Cup champions in 1974 and 1975.
Hextall has a while before the Flyers can compete for a Stanley Cup, but his latest moves — getting four draft picks and a serviceable defenseman for an almost-40-year-old defenseman on the verge of retiring, Kimmo Timonen, and underachieving Braydon Coburn — were a good start.
Make that a “great start.
On Friday, Chicago overpaid for Timonen, giving the Flyers a second-round pick in the June draft and a conditional pick that could be a second-rounder in 2016.
In the wee hours of Monday morning, Tampa Bay overpaid for Coburn, sending the Flyers hard-hitting defenseman Radko Gudas and a first- and third-round pick in this June’s very deep draft.
From the perspective of the Blackhawks and the Lightning, the trades were made to help them win the Stanley Cup this year.
To Hextall’s credit, he didn’t overreact, like many of his predecessors, to the fact that the Flyers are on the fringe of playoff contention.
In the past, the Flyers have had this strategy around trade deadline day if they were sniffing the playoffs: buy, buy, buy.
It cost them some much-needed draft picks and left their farm system rather barren.