Penguins reject trade offer for Jason Zucker.

The Pittsburgh Penguins have reportedly turned down a significant trade... although I can hardly blame them.

When the Penguins acquired veteran forward Jason Zucker at 28 years of age from the Minnesota Wild, they no doubt expected that they were adding a productive winger on a relatively manageable cap hit for several years to come. Unfortunately for the Penguins the Jason Zucker experiment has, at least up until this point, largely been a disappointment since he came into the fold.

In his first full season with the Penguins, Zucker played in just 38 games and had 9 goals and 9 assists for 18 points. In his most recent season Zucker appeared in just 41 regular season games, scoring 8 goals and adding 9 assists for a total of 17 points, doing so while eating up $5.5 million of the Penguins' valuable cap space.

Keeping that in mind it should come as no surprise then that Penguins general manager Ron Hextall was open to the possibility of clearing Zucker's cap hit off the books this summer, something that one team reportedly tried to take advantage of. A recent report from Penguins beat reporter Dave Molinari has revealed that an unnamed team within the Metropolitan Division attempted to weaponize their cap space in an effort to acquire both Zucker and an additional asset from Hextall and the Penguins.

According to Molinari, the deal would have seen the Penguins give up Zucker and a first round draft choice for effectively nothing:

Oh, the Penguins’ return probably would have been characterized as “future considerations,” but in today’s NHL, when one team is trying to shed significant salary, it can’t expect to get anything more than the hockey equivalent of a bag of mist in the deal.

We can easily narrow down the list of teams given the fact that we are talking about a team in the Metropolitan Division. The Penguins are of course excluded, while teams like the New York Rangers, New York Islanders, Philadelphia Flyers, Carolina Hurricanes and Washington Capitals are all right up against the National Hockey League's salary cap with $2.5 million in space or less.

I believe the two most likely candidates here, although this is pure speculation on my part, are the Columbus Blue Jackets, prior to making some major moves this summer, and the New Jersey Devils. Regardless of which team made the offer however, it seems Ron Hextall wisely chose to reject it.

The Calgary Flames made a similar deal this summer, packaging long time forward Sean Monahan and a first round draft pick to the Montreal Canadiens for future considerations. That trade was purely designed to clear Monahan's $6.375 million off the books for the Flames, and it appears that is the cost of doing business in this current climate of the NHL.

Zucker will be entering the final year of his current deal this season, and it seems likely that Hextall and the Penguins are betting on a better performance from Zucker this season while waiting out the final year of the deal.