The Penguins made a roster move yesterday. They have elected to put Jesse Puljujarvi on waivers. Puljujarvi was signed after going under the knife for a double hip surgery. Last year was spent recovering and working his strength and speed back while this year, I among others, thought he was going to get a legit shot to play regular minutes on a pretty meh Penguins team.

Puljujarvi (PIT) on waivers

— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) December 30, 2024

To this point this season I felt like Puljujarvi showed some promise as a bottom six player on the roster. His skating looked plenty good enough and I personally don’t think he should have consistently been outside of the top 12 forwards on the team. While a move like this isn’t the most egregious thing in the world I do believe they could have given Puljujarvi minutes, which in turn would show he is a useful player and if they really wanted to move on from him it could have been done so in the form of a trade.

Puljujarvi was a 52.53 xGF% player in his 21 games played. Additionally, he had a 1.91 points per 60 at 5v5. Meanwhile Matt Nieto, who also returned from major injury, has played in 17 games while at a 35.54 xGF%. His points per game is 0.7. This is probably one of those situations where Mike Sullivan is caught in his ways of overvaluing penalty killing. Nieto is a terrible 5v5 player and isn’t worthy of a lineup spot. Penalty kill specialists remain overrated and as far as I’m concerned is just code for this player stinks at 5v5. By merit Matt Nieto should be the one on waivers.

We’ll see if Puljujarvi gets claimed in 40 minutes or so. It is just a weird thing to invest in his injury recovery, see positive progress, and then kinda just kind of ignore him.

Thanks for reading!

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