When Pittsburgh GM Trevor Cook took over the team last summer, he immediately set to work on revamping the roster of an aging team that had missed the playoffs the year before. The goal was made clear from the moment he was hired and sweeping changes were expected.

Perhaps less expected was another revamp of the core one summer later. Cook brought in players like Nico Hischier, Jeremy Roy, Riley Tufte, Brandon Carlo, Hunter Shinkaruk, and prospects Vitaly Kravtsov and Matthew Robertson with the intention of building a contender around them. None of them made it a year in the organization.

"We came into this off-season with a couple of goals... we wanted to stay young, and we wanted a high-end defenseman and a high-end winger and maybe a little more physicality," said Cook. "The sheer size of the revamp isn't something we were after, it just kind of happened. We ended up finding a lot of deals that we thought made sense for us. Certainly we never expected to trade Nico, we never expected to trade Carlo or Robertson, and we thought a lot of those guys would be in Pittsburgh for a while. But we didn't want to pass up on the opportunities to acquire some of the players we've brought in."
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