If you pay attention to general managers in the NHL long enough, you’ll start to notice some patterns.

For Kyle Dubas and the Pittsburgh Penguins, the team’s general manager made a very similar signings two years in a row.

Before last season, the Penguins inked free agent forward Anthony Beauvillier to a one-year deal worth $1.25 million against the salary cap. The winger was coming off of two seasons that saw him play for four total teams. After starting the 2022-23 season in New York with the Islanders, he was traded to Vancouver midway through the year.

He stuck with the Canucks through that following summer, but was traded from Vancouver to Chicago early in the next season. The Blackhawks then flipped him to Nashville at that year’s trade deadline, where he eventually walked as a free agent.

While the circumstances surrounding their signings in Pittsburgh differ a little, Anthony Mantha was essentially this year’s Beauvillier signing.

Mantha, meanwhile, was coming to Pittsburgh with a slightly different experience. Like Beauvillier, Mantha had bounced around the league a little bit. He played for three teams in the last two years, but had his 2024-25 season cut way short due to injury.

He played just 13 games for the Calgary Flames that year before an ACL injury sidelined him for the rest of the year. As a free agent this summer, the Penguins inked him to a one-year, $2.5 million dollar deal, with some health-dependent incentives.

His brief season and slight down tick in production led to the Penguins being able to land Mantha for his lowest cap hit since his entry level contract, which expired in 2018. But for all intensive purposes, Mantha’s signing was just this year’s edition of the Beauvillier one.

The player was here to rehab his career, put up some points, and bump up his stock around the league. The team brought him in to fill up a roster spot, get some games of service out of them, and hopefully pick up some assets for them when the trade deadline rolled around.

So, about a fourth of the way into Pittsburgh’s season, and with the Penguins off the next few days while they return home from Sweden, I thought it would be interesting to compare Mantha’s start from this year to Beauvillier’s from last year.

Through his first 19 games with the Penguins last season, Beauvillier registered six goals and two assists for eight points. He was averaging 13:55 a night, took 46 total shots on goal (for a 13% shooting percentage), had two penalty minutes, and was a -1.

His production during that stretch was incredibly streaky. He only had points in two games during a 12-game October, but both of those games were multi-point efforts. Then, he also notched at least one point in each of his final three games to close out this time frame, including a three-game goal streak.

Given his contract, the Penguins were paying $156,250 per point through Beauvillier’s first 19 games that year. Keep that price tag in mind when we get to Mantha.

Beauvillier’s 19 game-run to open the year gave him the very odd 26-goal, eight-assist pace over an 82 game season. He did not come to sustaining those rates; in 63 total games with the Penguins, he finished with 13 goals and seven assists (20 points).

At the trade deadline, teams like the Penguins were able to take advantage of one of the more lopsided seller’s markets we’ve seen in recent years. Dubas was able to fetch a 2025 second round pick for Beauvillier, a winger whose career production had dropped over the last two seasons. Looking at it broadly, Beauvillier amassed just 37 points in his last 123 games.

That second round pick came in handy at the draft this summer, where Dubas packaged it with another second rounder to trade back into the first round. Acquiring the 24th overall pick from Los Angeles, the Penguins selected forward Will Horcoff.

It was a massive success for Penguins with their asset management, even if they had to make a trade with a divisional rival to get it done.

Now, to Mantha.

Through 19 games so far this season, Mantha has eight goals and six assists for 14 points. He’s averaging 15:43 a night, has 34 shots on goal (for a 23.5% shooting percentage), and is a +10. His only penalty taken this season was a five minute major he took for dropping the gloves with New Jersey’s Brenden Dillon.

He’s on pace for a 35-goal, 60-point season over an 82-game slate. Those would both far and away be career-highs for the 31-year-old.

Though Mantha was viewed as a top-six option for the Penguins even heading into the season, injuries to some of the team’s best offensive weapons has allowed Mantha to step into an even bigger role. He’s averaging his highest time on ice a night since the 2020-21 season, and excelling with that extra opportunity.

Mantha is accounting for twice as much against the cap as Beauvillier did, but his pay rate per point through this early stretch isn’t all that much higher. The Penguins are currently paying $178,571 per point for Mantha, just a difference of $22,321 between the two.

The main difference between Beauvillier and Mantha’s time here so far, however, is the success of the team around them.

Last season, the Penguins were 6-10-3 during Beauvillier’s first 19 games with the club. Their season started with a 6-0 blowout loss at home to the New York Rangers, and by the time mid-November rolled around, it seemed pretty clear that the team was heading for another lost year.

This year, the story is very different. Through Mantha’s first 19 games, the Penguins are a surprising 10-5-4. Even if the team has regressed some in recent weeks, Pittsburgh has still put together a much better start than literally everyone expected from them this season.

Mantha, to his credit, has played a big part in that. He’s fourth on the team in points, second in goals, tied for fifth in shots on goal, and leads the Penguins in plus-minus.

This is exactly the kind of the production you would want from a guy who you were planning to flip later in the season. However, with the Penguins charging into playoff talks so far this season, one of the big reasons for bringing Mantha in could become moot.

In the end, that’s probably a good problem to have. Keeping Mantha all season means the Penguins believe they might truly have something here and will try to make a run.

Of course, there’s a long time between now, the trade deadline, and the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. A lot can change, but no matter how the Penguins handle the rest of the season, they’re getting a terrific return on their investment in Mantha so far.