Malkin is back
At least one issue isn't covered in his new contract ... but it's critical
Most of the details of Evgeni Malkin’s new contract with the Penguins are pretty well-known.
The deal covers the 2026-27 season. It carries a salary-cap hit of $5.5 million. Malkin will be an unrestricted free agent when it expires (given his age, that’s the same as it was with his past half-dozen or so contracts).
One thing that presumably is not part of the contract – but that likely will go a long way toward determining whether bringing Malkin back for a 21st season was prudent – is that he must understand and accept the role he will be asked to fill.
Now, precisely where he will be plugged into the lineup probably won’t be known until training camp, but it is conceivable that he will end up back at right wing on the second line.
Certainly, Malkin will be penciled into a top-nine job, if only because pretty much nothing about his game suggests that he’d be effective on a fourth line.
That he did not seem to object to moving from center to the wing during the past season indicates that he won’t mind playing there again.
The tough part – and the one that won’t be clear for a while – is whether he will be willing to accept reduced ice time and being a healthy scratch every now and then.
Mind you, coach Dan Muse has not said anything to indicate that Malkin’s playing time will be trimmed or that he might sit out some games even if he’s not injured (or suspended), but the simple truth is that Malkin did some of his best work in 2025-26 after he had been sidelined for a while.
He’s going to be 40 on July 31, and no one can reasonably expect him – or almost any other player that age – to handle the workload he did a decade or so earlier.
If Malkin can embrace a modified role, there’s every reason to believe that he can be an effective and productive asset for the Penguins.
But if he balks at getting on the ice a bit less than in the past or at spending a game in street clothes occasionally and makes an issue of it – whether in public or just inside the locker room – bringing him back is a gamble GM Kyle Dubas should expect to lose.
Which is why the idea, if not the particulars, of Malkin playing a bit less – and doing it a bit less often than in the past 20 years – should have been as much a part of the negotiations for his new contract as the term and value of the deal were.