Articles in NHL Teams

from Tom Gulitti of the NHL's website,

William Nylander wants to remain with the Toronto Maple Leafs long term and the forward said he is unconcerned about heading into the final season of his current contract without signing a new deal.

"For me, the contract, obviously, I want it to work where I can stay there and be there," Nylander said at NHL European Player Media Tour on Wednesday. "There's no other place I want to play, but I still have one more year left. I don't understand why there's such a big rush to do something right now. I still have one more year left."

Nylander is heading into the final season of a six-year, $41.4 million contract (average annual value $6.9 million) he signed on Dec. 1, 2018, and will be eligible to become an unrestricted free agent when it expires.

But the 27-year-old said he has no interest in exploring the UFA market next summer.

"I want to be in Toronto as long as I can," he said. "That's just where my mind is at."

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SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA --- Arizona Coyotes General Manager Bill Armstrong announced today that the Coyotes have signed Head Coach André Tourigny to a three-year contract extension. As per club policy, the terms of the contract were not disclosed.

"We are very pleased to sign André to a three-year extension," said Armstrong. "He is an excellent coach, leader and communicator who has helped us establish a tremendous culture in our dressing room. Our players like him, respect him and compete hard for him. We are thrilled to have him signed as our head coach for the next three years."

from TSN,

Vancouver Canucks star Elias Pettersson has put extension talks "on hold" as he prepares for the upcoming season.

The 24-year-old centre is entering the final season of a three-year, $22.05 million deal, which carries a cap hit of $7.35 million. He is scheduled for restricted free agency next July.

"I've just put that on hold," Pettersson told NHL.com on Wednesday.(opens in a new tab) "I still have one more year left. I've been wanting to focus on training this summer and the contract will sort itself out."

Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin also took a passive approach to the contract situation in June, stating team would sit down with Pettersson's camp "when the time is right."

Pettersson scored 39 goals last season, topping the 30-goal mark for the second straight year, and also beat his career-best point total by 34 with 102 points in 80 games.

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from David Staples of the Edmonton Journal,

This in from the Edmonton Oilers, news that they’ve parted ways with head amateur scout Tyler Wright and brought in formers Avs head scout Rick Pracey to take his place: “The Edmonton Oilers announced Tuesday that Rick Pracey has been named Director of Amateur Scouting. The club also announced that it has mutually parted ways with Tyler Wright....

like this move. I like it a lot, but not for the obvious reason. The obvious reason, as we recently reported here, is that the Edmonton Oilers prospect pool was shut out of the NHL Network’s new list of Top 50 NHL prospects. Not one Oilers prospect was in the Top 50.

But is that Tyler Wright’s fault? Not so much. I’ll suggest it’s too early to judge his work in four seasons as Edmonton’s top scout.

more

from Tom Gulitti of the NHL's website,

Spencer Carbery has almost another month to wait before opening his first training camp as an NHL coach on Sept. 20, but he is eager to get to work with the Washington Capitals.

"We're champing at the bit here," Carbery said last week. "When things first happened, there's a lot of obligations and you're trying to just get settled in … Now that that stuff has all been taken care of, now it sort of gets to, 'Let's get this thing rolling.'"...

In general terms, what will these structural adjustments be?

"We're going to make a few alterations to our neutral-zone play, a couple things in the defensive zone, and then also some of our O-zone tactics and forecheck, we'll make a few subtle adjustments there which aren't going to be massive changes but little tweaks that are going to be important to highlight and make sure everybody is on the same page in the details of it."

Evgeny Kuznetsov showed the kind of positive impact he can have two seasons ago when he had 78 points (24 goals, 54 assists), but he wasn't as consistent last season when he had 55 points (12 goals, 43 assists). What can you do to help him get back to the level he was at two seasons ago?

"I think he's a very, very important player for our team. What he's capable of when he's on his game is world class and that's my challenge to help identify parts of his game, things I can help him with, put him in positions to have success. I have a real appreciation for the game that he plays and the style of play. I think understanding and appreciating the impact that he can have on a nightly basis when he's on his game, there's not a lot of players that can do what he can do. I'm going to do everything I can to help him get back to that level."

more Q & A

TAMPA BAY - The Tampa Bay Lightning signed forward Brandon Hagel to an eight-year contract extension worth an average annual value of $6.5 million, vice president and general manager Julien BriseBois announced today. The contract extension will begin with the 2024-25 season.

from Jesse Granger of The Athletic,

Cassidy raised his hand high above his head.

“I think before, as a coach, you’re always thinking you have to be ‘here’ all the time,” he said. “There are a lot of highs and lows, and you just have to find your game at the right time, and we were able to do that.”

Cassidy referred to the Golden Knights as an “imperfect team” at different times throughout the season. Vegas finished with the fifth-best record in the league in the regular season. The team was 14th in scoring and 11th in goals against. The power play ranked 18th and the penalty kill 19th. The Golden Knights didn’t have a player in the top-70 for league-wide scoring.

Nothing about the team’s statistics screamed “Stanley Cup champions” but all of the pieces were there, and they came together at the exact right time. What stood out most to Cassidy about his team’s play during the Cup run was the timeliness of its best games.

“We were close to perfect in the second period of Game 5 (to clinch the Stanley Cup against Florida).” he said. “Game 6 in Dallas. The second period in the clinching game in Edmonton. The third period (of Game 5) in Winnipeg. All four clinching games, I thought we dominated.”

Vegas won its close-out games by a ridiculous combined score of 24-6. A championship isn’t necessarily determined by the best overall team, but by which team plays its best hockey at the right time of year. This isn’t a major revelation, but it certainly drives the point home for the Golden Knights, and it’s a valuable lesson they may need in the near future.

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from Ethan Sears of the New York Post,

Garth Snow is free to speak his mind.

It has been five years, after all, since he was let go as Islanders general manager.

“I’m not under anyone’s control,” Snow said, and proceeded to speak his mind on how the Islanders have fared in recent years.

On John Tavares leaving the Islanders a month after Snow was fired in June 2018: “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

On the Islanders playing home games at Barclays Center, starting in 2015: “If Charles [Wang] didn’t go to Barclays Center, the Islanders wouldn’t have remained on Long Island. … But logistically it was a hot mess.”

On co-owner Scott Malkin: “There were things I’d recommend that got shot down. And then I chuckled when Lou [Lamoriello] got hired and well, they’re gonna go do the things I recommended.”

Snow’s 12-year tenure as Islanders GM covered a strange era in team history.

The Islanders hadn’t seen much on-ice success until the last few years, they dealt with a disastrous arena situation and they changed owners.

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from Kevin Allen of Detroit Hockey Now,

With most of the NHL teams putting the final touches on their preseason rosters, it seems curious that the Calgary Flames have yet to make a major trade. Mikael Backlund, Elias Lindholm, Chris Tanev and Noah Hanifin will be unrestricted free agents next summer.

If the Flames aren’t going to get these players re-signed, do they want to risk letting them walk away next summer without compensation?

The Boston Bruins are looking for a center and both Lindholm and Backlund could help the Bruins. Sportsnet’s Pat Steinberg has speculated that the Detroit Red Wings could be interested in a possible trade with Calgary. It does seem clear that Yzerman is pushing to get into the playoffs.

What you hear around the league is that salary cap issues have been the biggest impediment to Calgary making a trade. The Flames reportedly are trying to make some hockey trades. They will take salaries back. But the offers haven’t been good enough to satisfy general manager Craig Conroy.

continue for more topics...

from Mike Zeisberger of the NHL's website,

The Ottawa Senators are looking to end their six-season Stanley Cup Playoffs drought, and they believe goalie Joonas Korpisalo is the one to help them do it.

Since the Senators last qualified for the postseason in 2017, goalies Craig Anderson, Filip Gustavsson, Matt Murray, Anton Forsberg and Cam Talbot are among the big names who've tried to get Ottawa back to the postseason but were not able to do so.

Now it's Korpisalo's chance after he signed a five-year contract with Ottawa as an unrestricted free agent on July 1.

"He's got size, he's athletic, he's powerful, he's played in the playoffs, he's won a series," general manager Pierre Dorion said. "I think we're really comfortable moving forward now with our goaltenders."

This much is certain: Ottawa's two goalies will be comfortable with each other.

Korpisalo and Forsberg were teammates in the Columbus Blue Jackets organization.

"We go a long way back," Korpisalo said. "When I first came over to the U.S. we played together in the minors in Cleveland (American Hockey League) for a couple of years. We won together there and then we spent some time in Columbus. So, we go a long way back and we became friends immediately when we met each other. I'm super happy we created this tandem again."

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from Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News,

Rick Jeanneret, the legendary play-by-play voice of the Buffalo Sabres who became one of the franchise's biggest icons over his 51-year career behind the microphone, died Thursday night, the Sabres announced.

Jeanneret had turned 81 on July 23. A cause of death was not immediately available.

Jeanneret's bombastic style and high-powered goal and fight calls made him a fixture on NHL highlight packages on both sides of the border throughout his career. Sabres fans can routinely imitate many of his most famous ones, a list that's almost always led by the "May Day, May Day" call of Brad May's overtime goal that gave the Sabres a four-game sweep of the Boston Bruins in the first round of the 1993 Stanley Cup Playoffs and ended Buffalo's 10-year drought without a playoff win.

Jeanneret, who formed a play-by-play pair for the ages with longtime voice of the Sabres Ted Darling, started his career as the analyst on the team's radio broadcasts during the 1971-72 season, Buffalo's second in the NHL. He moved full-time to television in 1995 and the team went to a simulcast in 1997, with Jeanneret calling the game on both radio and TV with partners Jim Lorentz, Harry Neale and Rob Ray.

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Below watch some of his top calls.

from Mike Stephens of The Hockey News,

The NHL off-season is nearly at its end, and training camps are slowly approaching the horizon. But before the new season kicks off and optimism springs anew, let's take a look at the four teams who improved the least over the course of the summer.

BOSTON BRUINS

Betting against the Bruins is typically a fool's errand, given they were expected to take a big step backward heading into 2022-23 and instead proceeded to crank out the greatest regular-season performance of all-time, but this finally seems like the year their downfall begins.

It's staggering to see the level of talent that walked out of Boston this off-season....

CALGARY FLAMES

Frankly, Darryl Sutter getting kicked to the curb after spending last season arguably creating one of the most toxic environments in the NHL for some reason might be the one thing that gets the Flames back on track. The report that several players rescinded their trade requests the day after he was fired seems like a good sign.

Looking at the actual roster, though, leaves a lot to be desired....

FLORIDA PANTHERS

The Panthers' improbable run to the Stanley Cup final, fuelled by R-rated violence, historic goaltending and sheer unadulterated vibes, was a fantastic story. It also helped to mask the fact that this was a 92-point regular-season team that squeaked into the playoffs last year by a single point thanks, tangentially, to Ron Hextall's Pittsburgh Penguins not winning a late-April game against a stripped-bare Blackhawks roster.

Now the roster responsible for that little taste of playoff magic has been both broken and gutted....

more on each of the above plus a look at the Tampa Bay Lightning....

from Kevin McGran of the Toronto Star,

Just when noon struck on July 26 — the moment the Maple Leafs were allowed to put goalie Matt Murray on waivers for the purpose of buying him out — some completely different news appeared: Murray would be placed on long-term injured reserve to start the season.

Instead of the Leafs taking an $800,000 (U.S.) cap hit this year and a $2-million cap hit next year, they can put the entire amount of the annual average value of his contract — $4,687,500 — on LTIR. Combined with Jake Muzzin’s expected presence there due to lingering head issues, the Leafs went from a team in cap hell — projected to be $13 million over the cap — to a much more manageable number.

And collectively, hockey watchers went: “Well, isn’t that convenient?”

Skeptics certainly have their place when considering how some teams seem to manipulate LTIR cap space. It’s also not that much of a stretch to consider Murray may have somehow done more damage to himself in summer training.

If anyone was going to tweak something in the summer, you’d argue it would be Murray. He missed games to due injuries 16 times in his career, including three times last year with the Leafs. One of those times, he hurt himself in the pre-game warm-ups; in another, he tweaked his groin in a morning skate.

read on

via the YouTube channel of the Pittsburgh Penguins,

Throughout the first fifty years of the franchise, the Pittsburgh Penguins grew and fought through a multitude of adversities. At one point, winning the Stanley Cup seemed like a pipe dream. Through all the tumultuous twists and turns, the Penguins are one of the most successful franchises over the past half-century.

Watch the almost 3 hour video below.

"After I retired, I took about six or seven months off and just kind of hung out with the family and traveled a bit," he said. "Then I realized I was just kind of missing something. And that was having a goal, and, you know, striving for something that I've been striving for my whole career, which is the Stanley Cup. So at that point, I knew I wanted to be in hockey. And I was always interested in knowing how teams were built, what was behind it, the cap and all these different things.

"So at that time, I kind of called a few old friends that are general managers around the league and teams that I played for, and some GMs in the Canadian Junior League, and kind of picked their brains. And then I ended up having a really good conversation with (associated team). I went in and met with him and heard what he had to say, and then I kind of provided him with what I thought I could bring to the table. That kind of matched, and he and I hit it off from there."

Who is it?

from Adam Proteau of The Hockey News,

For each team, we’ll pick out one player, GM, coach or team owner to put on the hot seat as someone facing considerable pressure to put up excellent results this coming season or be relocated to their team’s doghouse. A second individual will go on the warm seat as someone who may not facing a firing or trade anytime soon but who the team has very high expectations for in 2023-24 and beyond. A third individual will be assigned to the cold seat, labeling them as highly likely to stay on their current team for a very long period.

ISLANDERS’ HOT SEAT: LANE LAMBERT, COACH

Lambert is entering his second season as Islanders coach. GM Lou Lamoriello has given him a lineup that isn't the most talented inside or outside their Metropolitan Division, so he’s got to find ways they can win. The Isles are capped out on the salary cap front, with a current payroll of $83.2 million in 2023-24, per PuckPedia. Lamoriello is famous for quickly replacing his coaches, and if the Islanders wobble and disappoint, Lambert is going to be under a massive microscope and have his tactics questioned.

The Isles went 42-31-9 last season and just barely squeaked into the final wild-card berth, earning it by only two standings points over the Metro's fifth-placed Pittsburgh Penguins. That’s where we expect they’ll be in 2023-24 – only this time, it could be the Islanders on the outside of the playoff picture looking in. If that’s how it goes for the Isles, Lambert could get the chop from Lamoriello. Most of their lineup is locked in for the long term, and it’s always much easier to change direction by taking out the coach instead of the players.

Coaching is a cutthroat business, and Lambert is well aware of the extremely high stakes he’s dealing with this season. To keep his job safe, Lambert has to deliver at least another Stanley Cup playoff appearance – and once he’s there, he must guide them far past the first round. Lamoriello’s itchy trigger finger when it comes to coaches should always give Lambert pause to appreciate his current surroundings. It could all end relatively quickly for him if his team underachieves.

read on

from Dan Kingerski of Pittsburgh Hockey Now,

Dubas is a Magician, but Goalies are Achillies Heel

There should be no question that Kyle Dubas is one of the better GMs in the game. He finds a way to get things done, whether it be an extension for Mitch Marner against all odds or the trade for Erik Karlsson. Dubas is creative and shrewd.

However, goaltending has been a soft spot on most of his teams. Dubas has rolled the dice with the Penguins goaltending, too.

No, starting goalie Tristan Jarry isn’t the big gamble, but the backup goalies. Alex Nedeljkovic had a terrible 2022-23 season. He played more games in the AHL than the NHL, but he’ll be both the Penguins’ insurance policy against further injuries to Jarry and the goalie tasked with playing about 30-35 games.

As a third goalie, Nedeljkovic was a very good bet. As the primary backup, the Penguins are one moment away from relying on Nedeljkovic to preserve their increasingly high hopes this season.

Laurent Brossoit and Antti Raanta would have been much safer signings for similar money (if they were willing to come to Pittsburgh). With the benefit of hindsight, Alex Lyon, who signed with Detroit for $900,000 for two seasons, also seemed a slightly better, if not safer, and less expensive option.

Nedeljkovic is undoubtedly a gamble. If the goalie recaptures his rookie-year form, it will be rewarding. The Penguins may regret the gamble if he has another year like the last.

more on the Penguins...

from Ryan Dixon of Sportsnet,

There is, however, another unique situation in the league right now Boston might be able to exploit in that two very, very good centres could be had via trade. Both Elias Lindholm of the Calgary Flames and Winnipeg Jet Mark Scheifele are one year away from unrestricted free agency with more than a little summer-long speculation their time with their current clubs could end before July 1 of 2024.

Scheifele, in particular, would seem like a dream fit for Boston.

Nobody is going to replicate Bergeron in terms of being a two-way presence, to say nothing of the calm, sturdy leadership he brought to the club. But if you’re forced into replacing a right-shot centre at the top of your lineup, you could sure do worse than slotting in another righty who comes in a six-foot-three package and just set a career high with 42 goals in the same season he turned 30.

There’s no denying a Scheifele move would be tricky for Boston on a couple of fronts. First off, the B’s have a bottom-five farm system and have already spent significant draft capital at recent trade deadlines trying, in vain, to bring the second title in careers of Bergeron and Krejci to Massachusetts. The futures Boston can offer just might not tantalize the Jets all that much.

Also, there’s that pesky salary cap that won’t be increasing for another year. The Bruins are already up against it, so squeezing in Scheifele’s hit of $6.1 million for 2023-24 would take some work.

Still, GM Don Sweeney could find a way.

more

from Travis Yost of TSN,

How much would you be willing to pay Tomas Tatar?

With most off-season business done (certainly so in the post-Erik Karlsson trade era), it’s hard to blame organizations for being radio silent right now. The lion’s share of contending teams either are pressed against the hard salary cap or already have an eye towards approaching training camp. And though a handful of intriguing names remain available – 34-year-old forward Patrick Kane perhaps at the top of that list – it’s unlikely we see many more player transactions in the month ahead.

One name I do anticipate coming off the board is the aforementioned Tatar, whose track record of production in recent years remains impressive. Just last season, Tatar managed 20 goals and 48 points in New Jersey’s high-flying lineup – high-quality, middle-six point production, and a continuance of what we have seen from Tatar after a fragmented stint in Vegas during the 2017-18 season.

At 32-years-old and well over 800 games of mileage, Tatar is likely looking for his last professional contract with term, which makes a return to New Jersey – who have under $2 million in cap space as of now – a bit of a challenge. For interested suitors outside of New Jersey, I see a few pivotal questions: how much did playing in the Devils up-tempo lineup positively influence Tatar and his style of play, does Tatar still merit a contract similar to the one that just expired (two-years, $9 million), and are there any indications Tatar’s game is at risk of slippage considering his age?

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from Lance Hornby of the Toronto Sun,

Bob Baun, hero of what most consider to be the gutsiest playoff goal in Maple Leafs history, has died at age 86.

A family member confirmed the news that the durable defenceman passed away Monday night. He had been in poor health in recent months.

Baun scored in overtime on April 23, 1964 after coming back into Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final from a shot block on Gordie Howe that fractured his fibula, carted off the ice at the Detroit Olympia.

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from Lyle Richardson at The Hockey News,

Patrick Kane remains the biggest name still available in this summer's free-agent market.

Rehabbing from a hip procedure, the 34-year-old winger isn't expected to be ready to return to action until December. By then, his agent has indicated he will field contract offers from potential Stanley Cup contenders.

Stephen Whyno of the Associated Press reported rumors linking Kane to the Buffalo Sabres. After years of rebuilding, they're a team on the rise with a solid core of young talent that could benefit from a player with his Stanley Cup experience.

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Rodion Amirov was diagnosed with a brain tumor two years ago and was drafted 15th by the Leafs in 2020.