By “make the money work a little better” you mean run a 20-man roster and still be over the cap? Pens say nope.

Edit: also, we don’t know if the Pens can trade Harkins. I believe a waiver claimed player must be offered to another team(s) who submitted a claim on said player before he can be traded. I.e., If both the Pens and Panthers submitted a waiver claim on Harkins the Pens would have to offer Harkins to Florida before they could trade him. If Florida declined, the Pens could trade him (unless a third team had submitted, etc.).

I honestly want to keep Harkins for now at least. Think he's looked pretty solid so far.

Dubas will definitely add to the bottom-6 at some point this year but not sure it will be Henrique… he doesn’t seem a dubas style player but weirder things happen every day so no dubas move would surprise me

Any ideas on players he could add that would be more his style?

If you manage the cap well, you can probably do this deal at the deadline. It’s pretty close to compliant

The easy answer is any player he has ties to, and other from his junior career or Toronto players that hit FA or waivers…
But there’s basically zero cap space so, unless the pens utilize LTIR a bunch this season, I don’t see anything major happening

Quite a few variables between now and the deadline that we can’t presently account for. Nominal cap space can quickly dissipate with injury callups. Regardless, they’ll have to send close to equal money back and the only semi-expensive player they’d like to dump isn’t going to waive for a team that’s in a position to sell.

Lmao he's been awful.

It's not entirely true that teams have to ship out similar amounts of cap near the deadline to acquire players with decently large cap hits.

Plenty of teams near the cap ceiling have acquired 3 million + cap hits without a corresponding cap move.

Said that after watching 1 game. After watching 2-3 more I can agree that he's not getting it done in the bottom 6. We need to completely reshape the 3rd line.