I was on Twitter today when I came across this interesting Buffalo Sabres thought exercise

You have $15 to make your team. Who are you taking? pic.twitter.com/buUPDD1cnA

— Chris Ostrander (@2ITB_Buffalo) April 30, 2019

I enjoy these kinds of things so I felt like creating one for the Penguins. Let’s just say it isn’t easy to not only select the players, but then allocate value to each one. I used Chris’ template as my guide. He appeared to break up the players into tiers that included a goalie, two defenseman, two wingers, and a center. I attempted to stay true to the template, but made adjustments where appropriate. I also tried to represent all of the eras of Penguins hockey.

The biggest difference you will see is I added an extra tier worth $6. I gave Mario Lemieux his own category. I don’t think it needs much explanation. He’s more valuable than any other player and is that much better. It would also make for a boring exercise with everybody taking a $5 Mario Lemieux.

Your task is to create your best lineup with $15. You need a goaltender, two defensemen, and three forwards.



Honorable mentions for forwards

Rick Tocchet, Jordan Staal, Petr Nedved, Ron Schock, Greg Malone, Rob Brown

It was tough leaving Tocchet off, but he just didn’t play in enough games for me to bump Joe Mullen off the list. Jordan Staal could probably make some of these lists, but the Penguins are somewhat decent at center.

Honorable mentions on defense

Ulf Samuelsson, Ryan Whitney, Dick Tarnstrom, Brian Dumoulin, Sergei Zubov

I would have loved to put Sergei Zubov on the list, but he didn’t even play in 70 games for the franchise. Ulf Samuelsson isn’t as good as Kasparaitis so he got bumped.

There was no shortage of talent throughout the eras of Penguins hockey. It was fun to peruse through all the names and numbers throughout the years creating the list.

Here is my lineup:

Ron Francis (3) – Sidney Crosby (5) - Evgeni Malkin (4)
Darius Kasparaitis (1) Kevin Hatcher (1)
Johan Hedberg (1)

Pains me to leave off both Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, but the money didn’t work. My team might give up some goals, but I'm betting they are more than capable of scoring a metric ton of their own.

Let’s see what you can do with your $15

Thanks for reading!

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