Usually the Pittsburgh Penguins are the one moving the 22-year old with upside and a draft pick in order to acquire a better player to feed their machine as a yearly playoff team. But the roles were reversed on Saturday, when it was the Pens who took the lesser player at the time of the trade and got an extra draft pick for it and traded out a better (but more expensive) player away.
John Marino could be seen as having plateaued in Pittsburgh, certainly offensively. After bursting on the scene, almost literally out of nowhere in 2019-20, Marino was never truly able to recapture the magic as a rookie, where he scored six goals and had 26 points in 56 games — all while putting up some of the best advanced defensive metrics in the entire league.