PITTSBURGH — The rest of the Eastern Conference keeps getting better.Though the Pittsburgh Penguins haven’t done anything wrong in recent days, they haven’t really done anything.And that’s OK. Imprudent decisions this time of year can stymie a franchise for a long time.There’s nothing wrong with being patient and not buying in what became a seller’s market. Kyle Dubas wanted to add talented young players to the Penguins’ roster. Make no mistake, several talented young players were dealt in recent days. Some are still available. He made it clear late Friday night at the team’s headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh that he liked a number of the players who were traded.Liam Ruck first of the Ruck twins to be draftedThe Athletic Hockey ShowHe simply didn’t have the ammunition to pull off the trades.Fair enough. For the Penguins, and their fans, this might be the hardest part of this rebuild, or mini-rebuild, or whatever you wish to call it. Perhaps only now, as opposed to a couple of years back, we’re seeing how much damage was done by the Ron Hextall regime and by the first year of Dubas’ regime. The Penguins finally have what can be considered a reasonable minor-league system. It’s not great, but it’s at least middle of the pack around the NHL, which is an accomplishment. And it’s getting better and better.Blowing it up for one trade isn’t something Dubas wanted.In fact, he probably couldn’t even if he tried. Patience will be required for the moment.Consider his answer when I asked him about the idea of making a trade in the past few days.“I think, in some of them, we really just haven’t had the assets to get there,” he said. “If you go through the younger guys that have been traded, it was a fourth overall pick (the Bowen Byram trade to the Chicago Blackhawks). The Florida-Ottawa pick was a ninth overall pick. We were at 22.”Several team sources speaking on background have told me in recent days that Dubas likes Byram quite a lot. He likes Mackie Samoskevich quite a bit, too. These are young players, first-round picks, players with high ceilings. That’s exactly what he’s looking for and exactly what he planned on acquiring all along this summer. He was very much interested in bringing at least one of them to Pittsburgh.But his hands were tied.Dubas was surprised by the asking prices around the league and even more surprised some teams met those asking prices. He didn’t have those kinds of assets to send, and I’m not entirely sure, in some cases, he would have made those deals anyway.