With the Pittsburgh Penguins’ 2022-23 season coming to an end without any postseason action, the Tribune-Review will offer Penguins A to Z, a player-by-player look at all 49 individuals signed to an NHL contract — including those whose deals do not begin until next season — with the organization, from mid-level prospect Corey Andonovski to top-six winger Jason Zucker.

This series will publish every weekday leading into the NHL Draft on June 28 and 29.

(Note: All contract information courtesy of Cap Friendly.)

Nathan Legare

Position: Right winger

Shoots: Right

Age: 22

Height: 6-foot

Weight: 208 pounds

2022-23 AHL statistics: 68 games, 19 points (eight goals, 11 assists)

Contract: In the second year of a three-year entry-level contract with a salary cap hit of $789,167. Pending restricted free agent in the 2024 offseason.

(Note: Legare is exempt from waivers for any transactions involving a minor league affiliate.)

Acquired: Third-round draft pick (No. 74 overall), June 22, 2019

Last season: Jim Rutherford’s tenure as general manager of the Penguins was known primarily for the back-to-back Stanley Cup championships it brought to the franchise in 2016 and 2017.

But sound drafting wasn’t a significant component of that success. In fact, those triumphs often came at the expense of the team’s ability to find and develop talent in-house.

Suffice it to say, Rutherford wasn’t often aggressive in the draft as he regularly dealt away picks to improve the roster in the immediate sense.

That made Nathan Legare something of a unicorn when the Penguins traded up in the 2019 draft to select him and made a pretty immediate push to sign him to an entry-level contract a few months afterward.

They felt they had a potential first-rounder in Legare.

Almost four years later, Legare looks like he might not even get a second contract from the Penguins.

After a rough first professional season in 2021-22 in which he was a regular healthy scratch, Legare seemed to make little progress in 2022-23, aside from not being scratched as often.

Cut from the NHL roster in the final days of training camp, Legare opened the season flipping between wings on Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s bottom-two lines and generated a single goal in his first 17 games of the 2022-23 campaign.

The closest Legare came to a scoring “outburst” occurred in late November and early December when he cobbled together four points (three goals, one assist) in five games.

But stretches like that were few and far between for Legare. His best game of the season — and there were few candidates for that designation — came during an 8-2 road win against the Bridgeport Islanders on April 8 when he scored a career-best two goals.

While Legare was not particularly proficient in producing offense, he did develop something of a penchant for agitating the opposition as evidenced by his team-leading 76 penalty minutes.

The future: Legare will enter the final year of his entry-level contract in dire need of major improvement.

He was a prolific scorer at the junior level and while it’s not fair to expect him to display the 40-goal form he offered in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, it’s not outrageous to hope he could be a 20-goal threat in the American Hockey League by this point of his professional career.

As it is, he has yet to even crack the 20-point mark as an AHLer.

Maybe it’s premature to give up on Legare, but time might be running out for him.

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