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.
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.
Rodion Amirov was diagnosed with a brain tumor two years ago and was drafted 15th by the Leafs in 2020.
— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) August 14, 2023
via the IIHF,
The International Ice Hockey Federation has reviewed the contracts entered into by Ivan Fedotov with, respectively the NHL and CSKA Hockey Club, to determine if a breach of the IIHF International Transfer Regulations has occurred.
Based on the evidence provided to the IIHF by the involved parties, the IIHF has determined that Ivan Fedotov has a valid NHL Contract with the Philadelphia Flyers Hockey Club for the 2023/2024 season. Accordingly, the IIHF has determined that Ivan Fedotov was in breach of a Professional Player Contract per Article II.4.1 of the IIHF International Transfer Regulations when he signed a contract with CSKA hockey club for the 2023/2024 season.
In accordance with Article II.4.1 of the IIHF International Transfer Regulations, Ivan Fedotov was given two (2) weeks to either go back to his former club (i.e Philadelphia Flyers Hockey Club); or obtain a release from his former club. As neither action occurred within the given period, the IIHF has imposed the following sporting sanctions on Ivan Fedotov:
- A four (4) month suspension on playing in official national and international games during playing periods. The suspension shall take effect on 1 September 2023 (first CSKA regular season game) and conclude on 31 December 2023.
A statement from David Krejci. pic.twitter.com/tVWAMsWAr8
— Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) August 14, 2023
from Mollie Walker of the New York Post,
The key signing was Wheeler for a multitude of reasons.
The former Jets captain agreed to a one-year deal with an average annual value of $1.1 million, which only crossed into seven figures because of a max $300,000 performance bonus incentive.
Otherwise, Wheeler will be making a base salary of $800,000 as he embarks on his 16th NHL season.
To put it in perspective, the 36-year-old was most recently carrying a cap hit of $8.25 million before Winnipeg bought out the final year of his five-year deal at the end of June.
That’s a potential pay cut of $7.15 million or more, depending on Wheeler’s play.
The price tag does not correlate with how much Wheeler will be expected to do for the Rangers.
“It’s exciting to see a player like Blake Wheeler pick our group,” Chris Kreider said last week in the locker room of the Terry Conners Ice Rink, where the Shoulder Check Showcase charity event was hosted to benefit the #HT40 Foundation. “A guy who’s in a position where he’s had a ton of success, he’s an incredible player, he’s had an outstanding career. And he looks at our group and says, ‘Yeah, they’re right there and I want to win a Cup.’ That’s quite the vote of confidence.
from Carol Schram of The Hockey News,
As they enter the last season of what's expected to be the last season of limited salary-cap growth, GMs around the NHL have learned every loophole and squeezed every penny of space out of their league's cost-certainty framework.
Long-term injured reserve (LTIR) is essentially the only tool that allows those GMs to exceed the salary-cap ceiling. That's valuable, but there's also a significant drawback. Teams that dip into LTIR can't accrue unused cap space and use it later in the year — most commonly, to add depth to their rosters at the trade deadline.
When LTIR support is required at the beginning of the season, there's a knack to maximizing the benefit. Managers need to get their season-opening rosters as close as possible to using every dollar of relief that's available.
Last year, with the salary-cap ceiling at $82.5 million, 13 of the NHL's 32 teams started the season in LTIR. Demonstrating that practice can make perfect, five of those 13 teams got their Accruable Cap Space Limit (ACSL) within $200 of the maximum that was available to them. The Vancouver Canucks became the first team in NHL history to match their LTIR number exactly, and the Toronto Maple Leafs came within $4.
With just under two months to go before teams declare their opening-day rosters on Oct. 9, PuckPedia shows just six teams over the salary-cap ceiling this summer.
Here's a look at the details of those six situations.
via Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun,
- A piece of cold reality in this odd Maple Leafs summer. Yes, adding depth with Martin Jones to their goaltending mix is nice, but if you look at this objectively, the Leafs rank no better than seventh in the Eastern Conference in goal. The top goalies in the East begin with Russians Andrei Vasilevskiy, Ilya Sorokin and Igor Shesterskin. Leafs have the fourth-best Russian in Ilya Samsonov. And that’s only if you rank him ahead of Sergei Bobrovsky, which may, in fact, be generous.
- I’m not sure why San Jose Sharks GM Mike Grier agreed to this aspect of the Erik Karlsson trade: The first-round pick he got from Pittsburgh was lottery protected. I would never have made the trade under those circumstances. Karlsson at 33, playing alongside 36-year-old Sidney Crosby, 37-year-old Evgeni Malkin, and 36-year-old Kris Letang is an experiment by Kyle Dubas that has just one shot at success. And Tristan Jarry has to be great in goal in Pittsburgh. He was pretty good two seasons ago. Last year, he wasn’t. If Jarry doesn’t return to form, the Penguins will not contend.
… True story: The Arizona Coyotes sent out a press release calling Logan Cooley the best prospect in hockey. Apparently, they’ve never heard of Connor Bedard down Phoenix way.
- Not sure I’ve ever seen a live game more dominant or perfect than Pavel Bure’s performance versus Finand at the 1998 Olympic Games in Japan. He scored five goals. He was absolutely electric. Almost all of them were highlight reel material.
Watch the five Bure goals below.
from Sportsnet,
Star defenceman Erik Karlsson has rediscovered his love of the game and the reigning Norris Trophy winner is now hoping to bring that spark to the Pittsburgh Penguins with his eyes on the top prize in hockey.
Karlsson captured the league's top defenceman award for the third time in his career last season, however, the San Jose Sharks missed the playoffs for the fourth consecutive year and led to a summer of swirling trade rumours.
Karlsson spoke to the Pittsburgh media for the first time since the trade on Wednesday and explained why he's glad to join the Penguins after a long summer.
"I was very excited about the opportunity to have a chance to go somewhere where I could be on a team that was contending," Karlsson said. "It was a lot of ups and downs and it was really hard to get a grasp on where things were actually at because obviously, I wasn’t in most of the conversations behind the scenes. ... I’m familiar with Pittsburgh from my days starting in Ottawa and so on and kinda knew quite a bit about it without really knowing that much. It was exciting when I heard that they were interested, so I'm happy that it worked out in the end."...
"I feel like I’m in a really good spot in my life right now. I had a lot of fun playing hockey last year and coming to the rink every day even though it wasn’t under the easiest of circumstances and we didn’t win many games. I credit everybody in San Jose from the coaching staff to my teammates there. We had fun together and we made it fun coming in and putting in the work. That was something that looking back probably was missing a little bit from the previous years."
Watch the full press conference below.
from David Amber of The Hockey News,
The Maple Leafs have added another goaltender to the mix.
The club announced on Wednesday that they signed Martin Jones to a one-year, $875,000 contract.
The 33-year-old netminder spent last season with the Seattle Kraken where he posted a 27-13-3 record with an .887 save percentage. He was a mainstay with the San Jose Sharks for six seasons. His tenure with the club started exceptionally well during the 2015-16 season, guiding the club to their first Stanley Cup Final. His play has tailed off since where he hasn't posted a save percentage above .900 in over five seasons.
The Leafs are adding Jones as insurance to a goaltending tandem that has had a history of injury. Ilya Samsonov is expected to be the team's starting goaltender heading into the 2023-24 season after a standout first year with Toronto.
from Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times,
In short, Kraken tickets are now the NHL’s most expensive by far — averaging $390 on secondary market resale platforms such as Ticketmaster and SeatGeek. That’s 6% higher than the next closest team, the Stanley Cup champion Vegas Golden Knights, at $367 per ticket....
That news couldn’t be better for the Kraken, who next spring will seek season ticket renewals from fans on minimum three-year plans. It’s a much better outlook than a year ago, after a dismal 60-point Kraken debut campaign sent the secondary market value of their tickets plummeting.
Fans who had prepaid for Kraken tickets in three, five and seven-year packages suddenly found similar single-game seats in their sections selling online for much less. And when they tried to resell their own seats — either because they couldn’t make all games or to subsidize their season ticket outlay — they often did so at a significant money loss.
That’s hardly a selling point for season ticket renewal. In fact, some Kraken fans even tried to escape their season ticket contracts early.
But the team had bought time to turn things around by requiring the minimum three-year commitments. And things began changing last season, with the Kraken jumping to 100 points and making the playoffs — coming within one victory of the Western Conference Final.
from Sportsnet,
Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is interested in purchasing land for a new arena in Mesa, John Gambadoro of Arizona Sports reports.
Gambadoro says Meruelo has submitted a letter of intent to buy 41 acres.
The report says the Coyotes also are looking at other sites, including Phoenix and Scottsdale, and that the target date for a new arena is the start of the 2026-27 season.
The Coyotes are looking for an NHL-sized arena after they lost a vote in spring to build a new facility in Tempe.
The Coyotes had hoped a new arena in Tempe would finally allow the franchise to settle down after playing in three different venues since moving to Arizona.
The team shared a downtown Phoenix arena with the NBA's Phoenix Suns after relocating from Winnipeg in 1996, then moved to Glendale's Gila River Arena in 2003. But the Coyotes had a troubled tenure in the Phoenix suburb.
via TSN's YouTube channel,
Speaking to the media for the first time since signing his one-year deal in Ottawa, Vladimir Tarasenko says he is excited at the chance of playing in a hockey crazy Canadian market, and feels like the Sens are a perfect fit since they are a young team who he believes are on the verge of taking the next step.
NEW YORK (August 8, 2023) -- The National Hockey League announced today the 2023-24 composite preseason schedule, a 15-day, 111-game slate played across 44 NHL and neutral-site venues in North America and Australia from Sept. 23 to Oct. 7.
The road to the 2024 Stanley Cup begins with an historic two-game series across the Pacific Ocean, when the Arizona Coyotes and Los Angeles Kings face off in Australia for the 2023 NHL Global Series™ – Melbourne. The two-game set between the Coyotes and Kings -- the first-ever NHL games in the Southern Hemisphere -- will be played on Saturday, Sept. 23 and Sunday, Sept. 24 at Rod Laver Arena.
Both games in Melbourne, 17 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone, will begin at 2 p.m. local time. That translates to 9 p.m., Pacific Time, on Friday, Sept. 22 and Saturday, Sept. 23.
from Patrick Brown of the Coyotes website,
Defenseman Matt Dumba is already warming up to his new home in the hot desert.
Dumba signed a one-year contract with Arizona on Monday, uprooting his life from the only NHL city he's called home to join a new-look Coyotes team that has added Logan Cooley, Sean Durzi, Jason Zucker, and Alex Kerfoot this offseason. Add to that the return of both Nick Bjugstad and Troy Stecher, who opted to come back to Arizona following their departures at the 2023 trade deadline, and Dumba said he's excited to get to work with his teammates in his new surroundings.
The 29-year-old has spent all 10 seasons of his NHL career in Minnesota, recording 79 goals and 157 assists in 598 career games with the Wild. Though Dumba said it was a tough decision to leave the Twin Cities for The Valley, he said the Coyotes were "always my front-runner."
Thus, he made the decision to head to the Southwest.
"The discussion I had with my girlfriend and with my family about what was right for us, we were weighing the pros and cons, and there weren't too many cons to coming to the desert," he said. "We just needed to take the time to look at everything and be calculated and make sure this is the right fit. We know it is, and I'm so happy to be here."
from Mark Madden of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,
Dubas got Erik Karlsson from San Jose. Karlsson was last year’s Norris Trophy winner as the NHL’s top defenseman. He’s signed through 2027 at a cap hit of $11.5 million. (The Sharks retained $1.5 million of that.)
In return, Dubas ditched four players he didn’t want: Forward Mikael Granlund, defensemen Jeff Petry and Jan Rutta and goaltender Casey DeSmith. That’s a combined cap hit of over $14 million.
By the time the machinations of the deal were totaled, Dubas had saved the Penguins $3 million in cap space.
The only real assets the Penguins surrendered were first- and second-round picks. They didn’t give up a top prospect, of which they have very few. (Two, maybe.)
Dubas mostly undid the idiocy of Ron Hextall’s tenure as GM in one trade — and got Karlsson, who had 101 points last season for a team than won 22 games and lost 60.
When I first heard about the deal, I thought it was a joke. If somebody had called my radio program proposing that trade, I’d have ridiculed them and hung up.
Hearing Matt Dumba closing in with Arizona, one year at approximately $4M
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) August 6, 2023
Pittsburgh and San Jose are completing an Erik Karlsson trade. Third team is Montreal
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) August 6, 2023
from David Dwork of The Hockey News,
The 33-year-old defenseman has played 682 games in the NHL and spent the past three seasons with the Florida Panthers.
They were three of his best in the league, and entering free agency, Gudas was one of the more coveted blueliners on the open market.
He ended up signing a 3-year, $12 million deal with the Anaheim Ducks, which was a hefty increase from the 3-year, $7.5 million contract he had signed with the Panthers back in 2020.
The contract brings a well-deserved raise for Gudas, who recently spoke with iSport in Czechia about his new deal.
"I'm not the youngest anymore, I knew that this was one of the last contracts for me," Gudas said, through translation. "We have four children, I also had to look at the financial side. I have considered all the factors. When I talked with my agent and my wife, Anaheim got along the best of all."...
Gudas was a player several teams were targeting and the Panthers were not in situation where they could get into a bidding war, as the team was only looking to add short-term, reasonably priced contracts.
As for the teams who expressed interest in Gudas, he mentioned three Canadian clubs: Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto.
"I was surprised how many teams contacted me," Gudas said. "I was glad they were interested. The season, actually the last two or three, were successful, and I'm glad that they noticed it elsewhere. I could basically choose, and I think I chose as best as I could. When I put everything together, from the contract to housing, the team, and what is wanted of me, Anaheim was the best option for me."
via the Washington Capitals,
The Washington Capitals have re-signed forward Tom Wilson to a seven-year, $45.5 million contract extension, senior vice president and general manager Brian MacLellan announced today. Wilson's extension will begin with the 2024-25 season and will carry an average annual value of $6.5 million. Wilson is under contract with Washington through the 2030-31 season.
"Tom possesses all the intangibles needed to win in this League and we are extremely pleased to sign him to a long-term contract, giving him the opportunity to finish his career in a Capitals' uniform," said MacLellan. "Throughout his career, Tom has improved every facet of his game through his drive and competitiveness. We feel his work ethic and leadership qualities will be a tremendous asset to our organization for years to come."
Jake Guentzel underwent successful right ankle surgery.
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) August 4, 2023
The surgery was performed on August 2 by Dr. Chris Coetzee at Twin Cities Orthopedics.
Guentzel will be re-evaluated in 12 weeks.
from Heather Engel at the NHL website.
The times are changing for the Buffalo Sabres and with them are greater expectations.
After finishing one point behind the Florida Panthers for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs last season, the Sabres appear poised to take the next step and potentially end the longest active NHL playoff drought at 12 seasons.
"Last year, there was no expectations," Buffalo captain Kyle Okposo said May 25. "Everybody's writing rosy articles and this group is a good team, it's becoming a good team. And that's great, but how do you do that with expectations? There's guys that are starting to get bigger contracts, there's guys that are starting to get noticed nationally. There's going to be lofty expectations next year and I think that we can't run from that.
"The time is now. Our window, I think it's opening, and we have to be prepared for that."
General manager Kevyn Adams and the front office has allowed one of the youngest rosters in the NHL to grow together, even with some Atlantic Division rivals opting for more of a splash in the offseason.
via the YouTube page of the NHL Network,
Elliotte Friedman is back for his first appearance in the month of August. He talks Oilers front office, Penguins front office, the latest on the Erik Karlsson trade front, and more on NHL Tonight.
via the Pittsburgh Penguins,
The Penguins have promoted Andy Saucier, Erik Heasley, Amanda Kessel and Trevor Daley to the following roles, it was announced today by President of Hockey Operations and General Manager Kyle Dubas.
"At this time, I feel it is best for continuity that I formally continue in both roles as President and General Manager in the hockey operations department," said Dubas. "We will continue to reevaluate the GM position alongside all others in future off-seasons, to ensure that we are optimizing all facets of the department. We have a small but extremely dedicated management team here, and I have come to know each of them quite well over the last couple of months. We have also added both Jason Spezza and Vukie Mpofu to provide us with a nice mixture of playing experience, front office acumen, and growth potential."
One player Jackson represents is Connor McDavid.
There is word this morning that player agent Jeff Jackson is joining the Edmonton Oilers in a President/CEO-type role. Specific details to come later today, but it’s a big move in NHL business circles.
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) August 3, 2023