The Pittsburgh Penguins have a new head coach for their American Hockey League team.

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins officially have a new head coach, it’s just not the name we were initially expecting.

After reports surfaced last week that Grant Potulny would be the next head coach in Wilkes-Barre, the Penguins announced on Wednesday that Kirk MacDonald has been hired for the job.

He replaces J.D. Forrest

MacDonald, 40, most recently coached the Dubuque Fighting Saints of the USHL between 2022 and 2024. During this past season he led the Fighting Saints to a 41-13-8 record during the regular season and captured the USHL’s Eastern Conference title. They ended up losing in the Clark Cup Finals to the Fargo Force.

Prior to coaching Dubuque, MacDonald had worked various minor league and NCAA coaching jobs, including significant time with the ECHL’s Reading Royals in multiple roles, including head coach from 2017-2022. During his time as head coach in Reading he led the team to the ECHL playoffs two times (and woud have had a third had the playoffs not been cancelled in 2019-20).

In terms of win-loss record his teams at both the ECHL and USHL level have won, and won quite a bit with some impressive regular season records.

Winning is nice, but at that level the most important thing for the Penguins is simply seeing progress from their young players and having players that are ready and capable to get a call-up to the NHL at a moment’s notice and be able to contribute.

The Penguins farm system is one of the thinnest in the league, but there should be some intriguing prospects in Wilkes-Barre this season including former first-round pick Owen Pickering and a couple of the players that came over in last year’s Jake Guentzel trade (Ville Koivunen; Vasily Ponomarev if he does not make the NHL roster out of training camp).