As I admittedly do too often, I found myself scrolling down Twitter/X and came across a snippet of an article that mentioned Marcus Pettersson.

I tracked this article down and found it in The Athletic. It was part of a larger state of the team-style piece written by Josh Yohe, which you can find here if you’d like.

The suggestion that the Penguins’ defenseman should be wearing a letter wasn’t taken all that kindly by the person I saw post it. Not because Pettersson isn’t deserving off the nod, but because to give him either an “A” or a “C”, you’d have to take one away from Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and/or Kris Letang to do so, which just simply isn’t going to happen.

But it did get me thinking about a hypothetical scenario where the Penguins had a different captain and different alternates. Who would those players be in this alternate universe?

I decided to take a swing at it.

In this hypothetical, I’m not sure what happens to the captain Crosby and the alternates Malkin and Letang, but it doesn’t really mater. Whether they have magically all retired before the start of this season, or there’s some sort of weird new NHL rule that says the current guard has to be changed, all that’s important in this world is that we need a new captain and two new alternates.

I also kept it to solely players that are currently on the Penguins’ roster. There’s simply no way of knowing who could come along in a few years, whether currently within the organization or not, when this scenario does actually come up. So while it narrows the field of candidates, I had to stick with players I know are Penguins.

Anyways, let’s get into it.