PITTSBURGH — The Pittsburgh Penguins’ future isn’t here yet, but with every decision, Kyle Dubas further reveals how he intends to get there.

Dubas, the Penguins’ president and general manager, isn’t as transparent as Jim Rutherford, who was the GM from 2014 to 2021. That would be impossible. You could give Rutherford a call, and he’d actually outline his plans with surprising accuracy and honesty, an extreme rarity among sports executives.

That said, in an email response to reporter questions after Monday’s trade with the Columbus Blue Jackets, Dubas was refreshingly clear about his plan. As I’ve said for more than a year, you can expect things to get very interesting in summer 2026. I still feel that way.

The Penguins traded a second-round pick, a third-round pick and Danton Heinen to Columbus Monday in return for talented 24-year-old winger Yegor Chinakhov. The two picks Dubas traded seem like a lot to give up for a talented-but-unreliable player. Chinakhov’s talent is obvious, but he’s hardly established. The Penguins are taking a chance on that talent, and perhaps more than that, they’re taking a chance on first-year head coach Dan Muse and the Penguins’ culture to make the trade a success.

Back to the transparency. We asked Dubas about the considerable haul he sent to Columbus. His emailed response: “No hesitation. We have a lot of draft picks and we need to use them to procure high-potential young players.”

OK, then. The trade was aggressive, but the Penguins have so many picks that they can take some chances.

That answer explains an awful lot.

Maybe the Penguins will make the playoffs this year. They probably won’t. Either way, Dubas’ plan doesn’t change all that much. This season was always about collecting future assets and improving the Penguins’ system to merely good, which it is, while giving it the resources to become great. It’s not great yet, but it’s on its way.

The work Dubas and Wes Clark, the team’s vice president of player personnel, have done in the past two drafts, while impossible to project this early, appears to have landed a handful of potentially impactful NHL players. You’ve seen 18-year-old Ben Kindel. You’ve seen glimpses of 19-year-old Harrison Brunicke. You know Will Horcoff, who turns 19 in January, is leading NCAA men’s hockey in goals.

No. 22 draft pick Bill Zonnon, also 19, has been hurt most of the season, but scouts adore him. There’s more talent past those two drafts: You may have heard of a guy named Sergei Murashov, the talented 21-year-old Russian goaltender picked in the 2022 fourth round, Hextall’s last Penguins draft. Don’t forget about Joel Blomqvist, the 23-year-old goaltender picked in the 2020 second round while Rutherford was still calling the shots.

So, yes, reinforcements are on the way. In June’s talent-rich 2026 NHL Draft, the Penguins still have their first-round pick, two second-round picks and two third-round picks. If this season goes sideways — a distinct possibility — Dubas could go into sell mode and add to those draft picks.

Of course, not all of those picks will be used by the Penguins, nor should they be.

In the modern-day NHL, this is a proven method for building teams.

Great players — the superstars, from Sidney Crosby to Alex Ovechkin, Connor McDavid to Nathan MacKinnon, Leon Draisaitl to Auston Matthews — seldom switch franchises. This isn’t the NBA. So, expecting a player of that ilk to show up in unrestricted free agency isn’t wise.

The two best ways to land great players: Get lucky in the draft, or make a massive trade, as Minnesota did to land Quinn Hughes.

You can only make trades like that if you have salary cap space, a willingness to use it, and a haul of draft picks.

Hello, Kyle.

Obvious disclaimer: Trading away all of your draft picks isn’t smart. You likely know the Penguins have been far too willing to make that mistake in the past.

Let’s again look to Rutherford. In 2018, when he was trying to trade for a specific player, I asked him how many draft picks he’d be willing to move.

“Whatever it takes,” he said.

That sounds a little risky.

His response: “I don’t really care about moving draft picks. Most of them don’t work out, historically speaking. I don’t like moving prospects. A couple of years ago, a team wanted to trade for Jake Guentzel. But we knew Jake was special, so we weren’t going to do it. You don’t really know about a player until he’s been in your system for a while. But draft picks? You’ve got to move them sometimes to get the players you want.”

It’s almost as if 2018 Rutherford was talking to 2025 Dubas.

The Penguins, even after giving up two in Monday’s trade, have 16 picks in the top three rounds over the next three drafts. They’ll keep most of them, I’m sure, while adding to a system better than the Penguins have had in 20 years. But some of those picks will be traded, because Dubas has the goods to take the shots he’s wanted to take since being hired in 2023.

The Penguins will have more than $50 million in cap space — a massive total — this summer. Teams typically don’t get ahead by buying hot-ticket free agents July 1. Dubas knows: He’s been burned by it. But he’ll have the money to land some impactful free agents nonetheless, and he may do so. That’s great, but he has something much more valuable: the draft picks to swing a blockbuster and the cap space to pay whichever players he lands.

The Penguins are no longer in sell mode, even if Dubas may deal veterans at the deadline if his team’s performance warrants it. They’re not in buy mode just yet, either. But their transformation is in sight, and it’s time for Dubas to get aggressive.

So far, he’s done very well in restocking and repositioning the Penguins. Now, it’s time to go hunting.

Monday’s trade was just the beginning.