Korczak, Carlile, and Van Riemsdyk Are In. The Holes Are Still There.

Kaedan Korczak, Declan Carlile, and Trevor van Riemsdyk are all in camp and, by the accounts coming out of the facility, genuinely glad to be here. That's a reasonable place to start. Three new defensemen joining an organization that needed them is news worth noting.

The context, though, is what it is. I wrote last week that Pittsburgh was opening camp short-handed on the blue line, with Melvin Fernström out and Caleb Jones's timeline still unclear. The arrival of three new faces doesn't change that math so much as it responds to it. Korczak came over from Vegas in the Wotherspoon trade this summer; Carlile and van Riemsdyk are newer additions. Together they give the coaching staff bodies to work with while the organization waits to see what it gets back from the injured pair.

Erik Karlsson and Kris Letang logged heavy minutes last season — north of 22 and 23 minutes a night respectively — and neither is getting younger. The new trio exists partly to keep that workload from becoming unsustainable before the calendar even turns to November. Whether any of them can hold a regular role is a camp question, not a settled one.

The short version: Pittsburgh patched the blue line the best it could this offseason. Whether the patch holds depends on players who aren't healthy yet.