From Healthy Scratch to Cornerstone: The Yegor Chinakhov Story — and the Blueprint Kyle Dubas Is Trying to Repeat

I. The Hard Fact

On December 29, Yegor Chinakhov was averaging 10 minutes and 18 seconds of ice time a night for a last-place Columbus team that had scratched him twice in two weeks. Seven months later, on July 6, he signed a three-year, $18.75 million contract to stay in Pittsburgh, an average annual value of $6.25 million for a player Columbus was actively trying to get off its books.

That's not a hot streak. That's a career getting rebuilt from the studs, in one season, in front of everybody. And if you want to understand where Kyle Dubas thinks this Penguins rebuild is actually headed — not the five-year, tear-it-to-the-foundation version fans braced for, but something faster — Chinakhov is the case study he keeps pointing back to.

This is his story first. The Dubas blueprint comes later, because it should. Chinakhov earned this piece on his own.

II. Omsk to Overlooked

Chinakhov didn't take the traditional star-prospect path to the NHL. He grew up playing for his hometown club's system in Omsk, Russia, and went undrafted in 2019 after an inconsistent junior season. Most 18-year-olds who get passed over once don't get a second look. Chinakhov used it as fuel: in 2019-20 with the MHL's Omskie Yastreby, he nearly quadrupled his production, jumping from eight goals and 16 points the year before to 27 goals and 69 points in 56 games — a breakout that put him back on NHL radar just in time for his second draft-eligible year.

Here's the part of the story that still doesn't quite add up on paper: when Columbus called his name 21st overall in the 2020 draft, it stunned the room. NHL Central Scouting had him rated 30th among European skaters. Most public draft boards didn't have him in their top 100 at all. NBC's broadcast, which had highlight footage cued up for every other first-round pick that night, reportedly had nothing on Chinakhov — they didn't even know who he was well enough to have a clip ready. Columbus took him anyway, a full round-and-a-half ahead of where the industry consensus said he belonged.

He validated it almost immediately, but not in North America. Loaned back to his hometown team, Avangard Omsk, for the 2020-21 season because of pandemic-related border issues, Chinakhov led all KHL players 20-and-under in points-per-game, won the league's Rookie of the Year award, and helped Avangard win the Gagarin Cup — Russia's answer to the Stanley Cup — as a teenager. That's about as good a foundation season as a 20-year-old prospect can have. It's also, in hindsight, close to the highest point of his career until this past March.

III. Columbus: The Slow Fade

The NHL version of Chinakhov never quite matched the KHL version. He debuted with Columbus in 2021-22, scored his first NHL goal that November, and settled into the frustrating middle ground every rebuilding team knows too well: flashes of the tools that made him a first-round reach, buried under inconsistency and a maddening run of injuries. Back problems cost him significant chunks of both the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons — a September 2023 back injury that shipped him to the AHL, a second one the following March that ended his season 17 games early.

His best Columbus season, 2023-24, still only netted 16 goals and 29 points in 53 games — real per-game production, but never a full healthy year to prove it was sustainable. Then came this past season's collapse. Under head coach Dean Evason, Chinakhov's ice time cratered from 15:43 per night in 2024-25 down to 10:18 in 2025-26. He was a healthy scratch multiple times. Three goals and six points in 29 games. He'd requested a trade out of Columbus over the summer, and by December, both sides were ready to be done. As one Hockey Writers piece bluntly put it heading into that Blue Jackets season: "Who's Yegor Chinakhov?" was still a fair question around the league, five years after he was drafted.

IV. The Trade Nobody Loved — At First

On December 29, Columbus sent Chinakhov to Pittsburgh for winger Danton Heinen, a 2026 second-round pick, and a 2027 third-round pick. Columbus GM Don Waddell framed it plainly: a change of scenery was in the best interests of both player and club. The early reaction in Pittsburgh was skeptical at best. One Hockey News breakdown called it "an unexpected move" and noted that on the surface, it looked like the Penguins might have given up a bit much for "a disgruntled, unproven former first-round pick" with an extensive injury history and no proof he could put it together at the NHL level.

That skepticism was fair at the time. Dubas was betting draft capital — the Penguins still held more first-through-third-round picks over the next several drafts than any team in hockey even after the deal — on a 24-year-old who'd never had a full healthy NHL season and had just been a healthy scratch for his own team. It read like a lottery ticket, not a plan.

V. The Turn

Here's what actually happened once Chinakhov put on a Pittsburgh sweater.

He didn't score in his Penguins debut on New Year's Day, but he scored in his second game two nights later in Detroit, and he never really stopped. He picked up eight points in his first 14 games in black and gold. Then came March — the Penguins playing extended stretches without both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, needing their depth to hold the playoff line — and Chinakhov delivered six goals and 15 points in 17 games during exactly the month Pittsburgh needed someone else to be the story. He closed the year on an eight-goal, 22-point tear over his final 18 games, a 69-point pace over a full 82-game season if you extrapolate it out. He earned a bigger power-play role than he'd ever gotten in Columbus, slotted in on the second line next to Malkin, and by the stretch run was drawing first-line reps in practice.

Worth saying plainly, because an honest piece has to: not everything in that surge is guaranteed to repeat. Chinakhov's on-ice shooting percentage jumped to 15.0% in Pittsburgh, three points above his career average, and his overall PDO — a measure that combines shooting and save percentage, where 100 is considered normal luck — sat at 102.7, which is the kind of number that tends to come back down. Some of what happened in Pittsburgh is a legitimately better role and legitimately better linemates. Some of it is puck luck that won't follow him into October.

VI. Cashing In

None of that stopped Dubas from making the bet permanent. On July 6, the Penguins signed Chinakhov to a three-year extension worth $18.75 million — a $6.25 million cap hit that reflects what he did in Pittsburgh, not what he'd done in five underwhelming years in Columbus. It's a deal that assumes a middle-six, top-six-caliber winger, not a reclamation flier anymore. He'll spend this season learning from Crosby and from a fellow Russian in Malkin, brought back for one more year. The player Columbus was ready to give away in December is now projected as a foundational piece of Pittsburgh's next competitive era.

VII. The Dubas Blueprint

This is the part of the story that matters to the rest of the Penguins' rebuild, and it's worth being direct about it: Chinakhov isn't an isolated success story to Dubas. He's the proof of concept.

Dubas inherited an older roster, a thin prospect pipeline, and a difficult, closing timeline around Crosby, Malkin, and Kris Letang. The traditional rebuild answer — bottom out, stockpile picks, wait five years — was never going to work with three future Hall of Famers still playing at a high level and a fanbase with zero appetite for a five-year teardown. So Dubas built a different model: hoard draft capital (Pittsburgh has held more picks in the top three rounds over the next several drafts than any team in the league at multiple points this year), then use a portion of that capital to buy specifically the kind of player Chinakhov was in December — talented, young, cheap, and stuck behind a bad fit or a bad situation somewhere else.

The pattern repeats across nearly every move he's made since: Philip Tomasino, a former first-round pick from Nashville in a similar draft-pedigree-and-age bracket to Chinakhov, acquired as a change-of-scenery bet the year before. Nick Robertson, a familiar name to Dubas from his Toronto days, added for a 2028 fourth-round pick after his development stalled behind a crowded Leafs lineup. Hendrix Lapierre, acquired from Washington for a pair of mid-round picks. Andrei Kuzmenko, signed after a down year in Los Angeles. Rutger McGroarty, brought in for Brayden Yager in a one-for-one swap built on the same theory — different situation, different tools, same bet on talent that just needs a new environment. As Dubas himself has framed the roster problem, Pittsburgh has stars playing well past their expected expiration dates and a wave of prospects still years from readiness, with almost nothing in between — and the fastest way to fill that gap isn't the draft alone. It's importing players like Chinakhov who are already NHL-ready and just need the right room.

This is the mechanism by which Dubas is trying to turn what should be a five-year rebuild into something closer to a two-year retool. A traditional rebuild waits on the draft to develop talent from scratch, which takes years even when the picks hit. Buying discounted, already-NHL-caliber players who are one change of scenery away from breaking out compresses that timeline dramatically — if it works. It's why the Penguins were reportedly "intrigued" by a similar profile in Shane Wright this summer: a former top-five pick, undeniable talent, stuck behind a logjam in Seattle, now available at a discount because his own organization has soured on him. That's not a coincidence. That's Dubas running the same play again, looking for the next Chinakhov.

VIII. The Honest Counterargument

The uncomfortable truth for anyone ready to declare this model bulletproof: it doesn't always work, and even Chinakhov's own numbers carry an asterisk. The shooting percentage spike and elevated PDO mean some regression toward his career norms is likely next season — the Penguins themselves seemed to acknowledge as much by framing his new contract around sustaining that pace across a full season, not assuming it as a given. Tomasino, cited as a similar-profile bet the year before Chinakhov, hasn't produced anywhere near the same breakout, a reminder that this model is a series of educated bets, not a formula that reliably prints results.

And the model has a structural limit: it depends on the market continuing to hand Dubas players other GMs have quit on, at prices Pittsburgh's remaining draft capital can still cover. That capital isn't infinite. Every Chinakhov-style swing spends a pick or a prospect the team can't spend twice, and the well of disgruntled, talented, buy-low forwards around the league isn't bottomless either.

IX. Three Predictions

1. Chinakhov's shooting percentage regresses, but the role does not — and he still finishes as a legitimate 25-goal, 55-to-60-point player this season, which is a very good return even without a repeat of last spring's heater.

2. Dubas makes at least one more Chinakhov-style trade before the trade deadline — a talented player buried on a bad roster, acquired for pick capital rather than NHL players, because that's now the identifiable house strategy rather than a one-off.

3. The Shane Wright pursuit, if it happens at any point this season, gets evaluated by outsiders using the Chinakhov comparison, and it should be — same profile, same bet, same question of whether the new environment unlocks what the old one couldn't.

X. The Bigger Picture

Strip away the name and the box score, and Chinakhov's season is really a story about how modern rebuilds don't have to look the way they used to. The old model said: bottom out, draft, wait, hope. Dubas's version says: keep the picks as currency, then spend them buying players other franchises have already decided aren't worth the patience — and bet that a change of room, a change of role, and a change of linemates is sometimes all the difference that was missing. It worked spectacularly with Chinakhov. It's the same math behind every reclamation swing since, and it's the same math sitting behind the Wright rumors right now.

Whether that math turns a five-year rebuild into a two-year one depends on how many more times Dubas can find another player standing exactly where Yegor Chinakhov was standing on December 29 — buried, overlooked, and one flight to Pittsburgh away from a $6.25 million answer to the question nobody in Columbus wanted to keep asking.

Steel City Spotlight will have more on the Penguins' offseason moves as training camp approaches.