Last week, the Pittsburgh Penguins did something unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the NHL.
The team signed goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to a wink-wink professional try out, where the future Hall of Famer played one period in the team’s September 27th preseason game vs the Columbus Blue Jackets. With a packed house behind him, Fleury made eight saves on eight shots in a 4-1 win.
Even if it was a preseason game that meant nothing statistically and didn’t count in the standings, PPG Paints Arena was cheering and the fans were on their feet in a way they haven’t been in years. It was truly a magical time, and based on how this season is projected to go, might honestly be the highlight of the year.
It was the full circle moment that Penguins fans had waited years for, pretty much ever since the Penguins made the tough decision to move off of him all the way back in 2017.
If you’re the fan of another team, you’d be forgiven for forgetting a lot of the details about Fleury’s exit from Pittsburgh.
But Penguins fans, especially after watching all of their goaltending struggles ever since, still remember the summer of 2017 very well.
The Penguins had just won their second straight Stanley Cup, and unlike the 2015-16 run, Fleury got to shine in the postseason this time around. Fleury appeared in 15 games for the Penguins that postseason, and recorded a stellar .924 save percentage and 2.56 goals against average, along with two shutouts.
He accounted for over half of Pittsburgh’s 16 wins to capture the Cup once again, helping defeat Columbus in the first round, Washington in the second, and partially through Ottawa in the Eastern Conference Finals before a healthy Matt Murray re-claimed the net and took the Penguins the rest of the way.
But shortly after the initial celebration in Pittsburgh, a somber reality began to set in. With the Vegas Expansion Draft looming, the Penguins were going to have to lose one of their two stellar goaltenders.
Whether that meant trading one away, or simply exposing one to the Golden Knights to legally steal, one of them had to leave.
For the Penguins, that was ultimately Fleury, and for how wrong that decision looks in the present day, it’s important to keep the context of the time in mind. Murray was nearly ten years younger, almost $5 million cheaper, and had just won back-to-back Stanley Cups as a rookie.
Murray also had stats in net than Fleury in both the regular season and playoffs that year. Murray put up a .923 save percentage and 2.41 goals against average in the regular season, and upped that to a league-leading .931 save percentage and 1.70 goals against average in the playoffs, along with three shutouts in ten starts.
Yeah, the Penguins ultimately blew it. But they made the technically correct at the decision.
In the days leading up to the Vegas Expansion Draft on June 21st, 2017, teams tripped over themselves to make deals with the Golden Knights, believing they were making trades in the best interest of their own team and dunking on the new team in the process. Vegas proved them all wrong, and Pittsburgh was no exception.
Everyone remembers Vegas selecting Fleury in the expansion draft.
But not everyone might remember that the Penguins paid the Golden Knights a second round pick as part of that whole ordeal.
Officially, that trade was labeled “expansion draft considerations,” but the Penguins sent a 2020 second round pick with the agreement that the Golden Knights select Fleury in the draft.
A lot of things could be changed in hindsight, and one draft pick heading to Vegas didn’t make or break either club. But looking back, that was entirely unnecessary for the Penguins to do.
Yes, it was done so that the Penguins wouldn’t be caught by surprise by Vegas deciding to pick someone else, but the team didn’t have a ton of other players who made the decision for the Golden Knights challenging. On their unprotected list, the Penguins put forwards Carl Hagelin and Bryan Rust, as well as defensemen Ian Cole.
But come on, were the Golden Knights really taking anyone else? Rust perhaps, but he was not nearly the player is today back in 2017. Fleury, meanwhile, was in his prime.
Anyways, that’s not really what this article is about, so I suppose I’ll get to the point.
Interestingly enough, Vegas never used this pick.
To everyone’s shock, Vegas had made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final in 2018, back when they were adoringly known as the “Golden Misfits” and everyone still liked them.
That run immediately established the Golden Knights as an annual Cup contender year, and by the time 2020 rolled around, Vegas was much more in the trading business than they were the drafting one. They were going for it every year, meaning a second rounder was something meant to be fired into the sun come every early spring.
So, at the trade deadline in 2020, just a few short weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic would wreck the NHL season and all of our lives with it, this Penguins draft pick was traded from Vegas to Chicago in a deadline deal.
The Golden Knights shored up their goaltending tandem by adding Robin Lehner from the Blackhawks, sending goaltender Malcom Subban, forward prospect Stanislav Demin, and this draft pick.
Lehner would back up Fleury for the next year and a half before the Golden Knights shipped Fleury off (ironically, to Chicago) for practically free, and Lehner took over as the starter briefly.
Meanwhile, the Blackhawks held onto that pick through that summer’s virtual draft. At 46th overall, they selected goaltender Drew Commesso from the US National Team Development Program.
In 30 games that year with the U18 team, Commesso posted a .920 save percentage and 2.05 goals against average.
After his draft, Commesso went on to play three years at Boston University. In his final year with the Terriers, Commesso went a stellar 24-8 with a .913 save percentage and 2.46 goals against average.
Two years ago, he turned pro and spent a year in the American Hockey League with Chicago’s affiliate, the Rockford IceHogs. In 38 AHL games during the 2023-24 season, Commesso had a .906 save percentage and 2.65 goals against average. Last year, he slightly improved those numbers to a .911 save percentage and 2.54 goals against average in 39 games.
Commesso also made his NHL debut last year, making two saves on as many shots in relief against the New York Islanders on December 12th. Two days later, he made his first NHL start, with 20 saves on 24 shots.
Perhaps this ultimate irony is this whole story is this, however: in that same draft all the way back in 2020, when the draft pick the Penguins “paid” Vegas to take Fleury was finally used, Pittsburgh traded away a diminished Murray to Ottawa, ending his time with the team.
The Penguins received a 2020 second round pick (originally belonging to Columbus), and six spots after Commesso was taken, Pittsburgh took a goaltender themselves by the name of Joel Blomqvist.
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