Golden Knights trade Reilly Smith to Penguins, re-sign forward Ivan Barbashev to five-year contract

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The Stanley Cup champion Vegas Golden Knights are already preparing to try to repeat, trading a longtime franchise cornerstone and keeping their best trade deadline pickup.

Vegas traded Reilly Smith to the Pittsburgh Penguins on Wednesday and re-signed fellow forward Ivan Barbashev to a five-year contract worth $25 million. The moves came hours before the start of NHL draft.

"We think this will give us the ability to pretty much return our team in whole, so that was our objective," general manager Kelly McCrimmon said in Nashville, Tennessee, before the draft began. "All of the decisions that we were making were on people that we just won a Stanley Cup with, so by definition, that makes those decisions difficult and challenging to make. But we feel that we got our way through it and are excited about what it could mean for the makeup of our roster."

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The Vegas Golden Knights' Reilly Smith (19) poses with his family and the Stanley Cup after the Knights eliminated the Florida Panthers in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final at T-Mobile Arena on June 13, 2023, in Las Vegas.  (Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Barbashev, a key contributor on the Golden Knights' title run with 18 points in 22 games, was expected to be one of the top players available in free agency. Instead, the 27-year-old Russian power forward will count $5 million against the salary cap through 2028.

"We’ve been looking for a player like this for some time," McCrimmon said. "He’s in the prime of his career. We gave up a good young player to acquire him. He came in. He