Has Dubas given Penguins youth?

Each of team’s top-six returning point scorers from last season is over 30

- CAMERON HOOVER

Kyle Dubas’s acquisitions average about two-and-a-half years younger than his departures.

Penguins president of hockey operations Kyle Dubas had one clear-cut objective this off-season: Make the team younger.

After the Penguins disappointed and missed the Stanley Cup playoffs for a second consecutive campaign — squandering another spectacular season from Sidney Crosby — many wondered if the rebuild would truly get underway.

Dubas dispelled those notions pretty quickly at his end-of-season wrap-up press conference.

Rather than going “full-on scorched earth,” as he put it, Dubas elected for a more measured approach, hoping to restock the roster with younger, perhaps more energetic talent — and the team’s war chest with more fruitful future assets — to give his core of aging stars one last run at another championship together.

“The easy answer when you’re up here is to say, ‘OK, we’re just going to rip it all the way down, and it’s going to require patience, and it’s going to be painful,’” Dubas said back in April. “With our group, it would be foolish not to try to get those younger players in around (veteran leaders) like Sid, like Kris Letang, like Bryan Rust.

“My view is that there are more examples of late of teams that contended when (Pittsburgh) was contending that have pivoted in short order to replenishing their younger group of assets — whether that’s prospects, picks or players — and then turning quickly while the key members of their group were still there.”

Many things need to happen for the Penguins to return to prominence and make some real noise in the playoffs, but Dubas is betting that a more exuberant, youthful roster is one of those.

Now, as the NHL off-season wanes and training camp appears on the horizon, let’s look at who’s in and who’s out to see if Dubas accomplished his task. But first …

Are the Penguins even that old?