Did Kyle Dubas just accept the toughest front office job in the NHL?

Kyle Dubas tinkered with the roller coaster as best he could. He swapped out more passengers than he ever had this season. He filled it with the most experienced and accomplished parkgoers he could find. He did get the Toronto Maple Leafs closer to the peak than they had been in 19 years with one whole playoff series win, ­but really, he took them nowhere close to the top of the ride.

Now, in taking over as president (and interim GM) of the Pittsburgh Penguins, he finds himself at a very different juncture of the ride. He’s taking over a roller coaster that reached the thrilling peak years ago and is clearly on its descent. He’s inheriting a team only just getting used to the idea of being below average, having just wrapped up a 16-year streak of postseason berths.

In accepting control over a team very much in limbo, Dubas might have the toughest front office assignment in the NHL going forward.

Nothing in his opening presser Thursday would suggest as much, of course. What was he going to say: “This is going to be a grind”? It was no surprise to see him speak enthusiastically about jumping from a core of stars aged 25 (Auston Matthews), 26 (Mitch Marner), 27 (William Nylander), 29 (Morgan Rielly) and 32 (John Tavares) to one founded on a 35-year-old and two 36-year-olds.

“The way I view it is that if people want to bet against Mike Sullivan, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and others, they can go ahead and do so — but I’m gonna bet on them and go with them,” Dubas told reporters.

One could counter-argue that Dubas is inheriting a core of proven winners this time and that he’s the perfect architect given his experience insulating stars with cheap depth. But Ron Hextall and Brian Burke left quite the mess for Dubas to clean up: As currently constructed, the Pens have resided in the NHL’s murky middle, not good enough to compete for a Stanley Cup nor bad enough to load up on impactful prospect assets.

With Crosby signed two more years and Malkin and Letang aboard three and five more seasons, respectively, the Penguins have no designs on tanking despite missing the playoffs for the first time in 17 years this season. So how can Dubas and his incoming GM hire avoid turning the Penguins into a slowly sinking ship, aboard which its franchise icons push back on the idea of a rebuild — like what we saw with Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane in Chicago as the Blackhawks bottomed out in the seasons after their mini dynasty?

Dubas still has something to work with, of course. The Pens are not a three-man team. They still have effective top-six wingers in Jake Guentzel, Bryan Rust and Rickard Rakell. They have an underrated shutdown presence on defense in Marcus Pettersson. They actually ranked among the better teams in the NHL in 5-on-5 shot attempt share and expected goal share this season. Their special teams sat in the top half of the NHL, too. They missed the playoffs by a single point, and the team that took their place has gone all the way to the Stanley Cup Final.

That’s the good, but there’s a whole lot of ugly to repair. Mikael Granlund, the disastrous trade acquisition, looks like a buyout candidate. There’s the dead weight of Jeff Carter’s contract. The Penguins’ forward depth outside the top six was nightmarishly poor in 2022-23. Dubas does have a history of finding effective forwards at reasonable costs — from Michael Bunting to Ondrej Kase to Calle Jarnkrok — but in Toronto, he was using those signings to complement superstar-grade players in their primes. The Penguins finished this season as the NHL’s oldest team by average age. Crosby is fresh off an amazingly effective 93-point season in which he played every game at 35, and Malkin turned back the clock for much of 2022-23 as well, but their aging curves are still doomed to trend downward. They are two of the greatest superstars ever to play, but they aren’t superstars in the present.

It’s also not as if Dubas can devote all $20 million of the Pens’ current cap space to forwards. Letang delivered another excellent season at 36 when factoring in that he overcame another stroke and the death of his father, but behind him are Pettersson, the injury-prone Jeff Petry, Jan Rutta, Pierre-Olivier Joseph and Chad Ruhwedel, with Brian Dumoulin and Dmitry Kulikov set to walk as unrestricted free agents. Not good enough.

Then there’s the goaltending conundrum. Casey DeSmith is signed as a serviceable backup, but what will Dubas do about Tristan Jarry? He has alternated between looking elite, slumping badly and getting hurt, seemingly in a perpetual cycle since debuting with the Penguins in 2016-17. Dubas indicated in his opening presser that Jarry’s future with the team is very much to be evaluated. He’s far from a lock to re-sign.

So if we’re keeping score: We have a new team president expressing a optimisim about winning in the present despite:

(a) A top-six forward group that ranks among the oldest in the league
(b) Some of the worst forward depth in the NHL
(c) A shallow and injury-prone defense corps
(d) No idea who the starting goaltender will be

And I’ll add (e): Virtually no help coming from within thanks to arguably the weakest prospect crop in the NHL, the product of years of contention, picking twice in the first round in the past eight drafts. All the Pens’ picks over their past four drafts put together have combined to play four NHL games.

Maybe there’s a way out. Dubas is a brilliant hockey mind who has lots of practice manipulating rosters that are boxed in by heavy salary commitments. It won’t be remotely surprising if he makes some shrewd depth additions that help this team claw back the points it lost in the standings this season.

But the name of the game is winning a Stanley Cup, not just being competitive. Given the team’s aging star structure and lack of prospect capital, one could argue Pittsburgh is doomed to stay "mid" for years to come. And if they’re miles away from rock bottom? They might be the furthest team in the NHL from a championship, far too good to fail miserably but not good enough to realistically compete for the big prize. I hope Dubas brought his patience with him to Pittsburgh.