FanHouse Evgeni Malkin

I don't know how Penguins general manager Ray Shero pulled it off, but he managed to not only retain the services of Ruslan Fedotenko and Bill Guerin, two of the teams top-six forwards from their Stanley Cup winning team, but he did so while getting them to take paycuts.

After signing Guerin to a one-year deal on Monday, the Penguins announced that they agreed to terms with Fedotenko Friday afternoon. Rob Rossi of the Tribune Review reports the deal as being worth $1.8 million, down from the $2.25 million he made a season ago.

It's officially the offseason, meaning the time is right to look into the future. We continue our division-by-division preview of the potential wheeling and dealing with the Atlantic Division.

It will be an interesting summer for the five teams in the Atlantic. Four teams made the playoffs, including the eventual Stanley Cup champion, and the one team that didn't make it -- the New York Islanders -- holds the first pick in Friday's draft, which isn't a bad consolation prize. All around it was a pretty successful season for these five teams.

The real NHL awards will be handed out Thursday night in Las Vegas, so FanHouse decided to hand out its own special awards for the 2008-09 season.

It's designed to maintain competitive balance and parity across the league, but if you waste valuable salary cap space on free agents that don't pan out or contribute the way you expected, you're pretty much stuck without a paddle because nobody is going to bail you out and take that albatross contract off your hands.

Introducing the FanHouse nominees for the Wade Redden Award for Wasted Cap Space.

Let the free agent frenzy begin! Sort of. There are reports surfacing out of Russia that KHL clubs Metallurg Magnitogorsk and Bary's Astana are interested in signing Pittsburgh Penguins free agents Petr Sykora and Miroslav Satan.

Any truth to the rumors? Not if you ask their agent, Allan Walsh, who denied the reports via his twitter feed (technology ... amazing).

It's officially the offseason, meaning the time is right to look into the future. We'll be running our division-by-division preview of the offseason beginning later in the week, but we wanted to give the two top dogs their own space. Yesterday we took a look at the Red Wings. Today: the summer outlook for the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Thanks to Max Talbot's two-goal performance in Game 7, along with Marc-Andre Fleury's buzzer-beating save on Nicklas Lidstrom, the Pittsburgh Penguins brought home their third Stanley Cup. General manager Ray Shero now has the task of dealing with 10 unrestricted free agents and finding a way to construct a team that is capable of keeping the Cup in Pittsburgh.

In Chicago, Milton Bradley further endears himself to Cubdom by flipping a ball into the seats with two out, a farcical sign that 100 years without a World Series title soon will be 101. In Cleveland, the poor people still haven't won a championship in any sport since 1964 and might lose LeBron James to New York, assuming the gulls and midges don't eat him first. In Buffalo, they're not yet over the sting of reaching the Super Bowl four times and losing four times, which still trumps chicken wings as the civic identity.

"That's life," Bradley explained. "These people have high expectations. I have high expectations for myself. I never made a mistake like that (losing track of the outs) in my life. Sue me."

"Something needs to be done," the Indians' Ryan Garko said of the birds and bugs that attack Progressive Field. "There's got to be a way to get rid of them. It's kind of embarrassing. We look like a bunch of kids playing on an abandoned field. It's kind of funny, but kind of not funny."

The Pittsburgh Penguins ended a 17-year Stanley Cup drought on Friday night with a 2-1 win over the Detroit Red Wings, giving the franchise its third championship. While current general manager Ray Shero will get his name on the cup for overseeing the hockey operations the past three seasons, former general manager Craig Patrick also had a hand in putting this team together.

After the jump, a player-by-player look at how the 2008-09 Penguins were built over the years.

So I'm watching the morning Sportscenter, and after going through the highlights of Friday's Game 7, I hear Neil Everett drop the following line: "I just Googled Max Talbot to find out more about him and the first thing I find is a bunch of pictures of him shirtless, kissing girls, so he must be the dude."

Now you know, Neil. Now you know. With his performance in Pittsburgh's 2-1 win on Friday night, Talbot wrote his chapter in Penguins history by scoring both goals in the deciding game of the Stanley Cup final. While this puts him on the NHL map, he's has been a superstar in Pittsburgh for the past two seasons, not only for his gritty, hard-working style of play, but for his flawless performances as a spokesperson (sort of) for A & L Motors in Pittsburgh.

DETROIT -- Extraordinary. Wait, that word isn't grand enough to describe what happened here Friday night. Thrilling? Stunning? It was both, and so much more. It was babyface goalie Marc-Andre Fleury making a couple of huge saves in the final, throat-clutching seconds. It was Sidney Crosby lifting the silver chalice and kissing it once, twice, barely buckling under his twisted knee. It was heavy-handed Maxime Talbot scoring a pair of improbable goals, while Evgeni Malkin raised his game to an entirely different level.

It was Marian Hossa dropping to his knees in sorrow, the pain that accompanies having to watch another team celebrate on his home ice for the second straight season almost unbearable. It was Chris Osgood, dazzling in goal, but not dazzling enough. It was a wave of wing-wheeled, veteran Europeans pushing the reigning champions as hard as they could be pushed, and the young, energetic pups in black refusing to budge.

It was Pittsburgh 2, Detroit 1, the Stanley Cup changing hands in spectacular fashion.

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The Conn Smythe Trophy has been handed out since 1965. It's given to the most valuable player of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

In 2009, this was not an easy decision. There were plenty of viable candidates on both of the finalists, the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins. Though five players have won the Conn Smythe while playing for the team that lost the Finals, this was not a year for that to happen.