The Vegas Golden Knights failed to issue a qualifying offer to free agent forward Tomas Nosek this week, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be hitting the open market. Golden Knights president George McPhee confirmed to Jesse Granger of The Athletic that the team is close to a deal with Nosek, though nothing has been officially submitted yet.
Nosek, 26, is coming off a one-year $962K contract with the Golden Knights and ended up playing in 68 games for them last season. The undrafted forward recorded just 17 points but had excellent possession numbers and was a key part of the team’s penalty kill. Vegas recently cleared some cap room by dealing Erik Haula to the Carolina Hurricanes, but still have plenty of work to do in order to get under the cap and give themselves a little bit of wiggle room for the upcoming season. Another move can be expected soon, as McPhee explained to SinBin.vegas when asked about whether Nikita Gusev’s presence allowed them to move Haula:
Um, yeah, I guess so. And again, we’ll see where things go in the next few days, but we made a move yesterday and there’s probably another one coming. We’ll talk about that when it happens.
Gusev is one of a few restricted free agents that did get qualifying offers and will need new contracts in the coming months. Where the team will find the room for that is unclear, but for now they’re at least confident that they can get a deal done with Nosek before any other team comes calling for the depth forward.
I was under the impression Vegas qualified all their RFAs.
That was the initial report based on something McPhee said, however they in fact did not qualify Nosek, Alex Gallant, Tobias Lindberg, Tomas Hyka and Zach Fucale.
Offers were issued to Gusev, Malcolm Subban, Jake Bischoff and Jimmy Schuldt.
Craig Button is one of those guys who is good at sounding like a GM on TV, but…
Forget his time with the Flames…a few years ago (his draft year), I saw him say that Zach Fucale was the best goalie prospect he’d seen in years.
Even a casual observer could see that Fucale was likely the product of a stacked Halifax (McKinnon, Drouin, etc.) Mooseheads team, but not Button.
Thanks