Just recently, the Vegas Golden Knights were reportedly working on purchasing an AHL team and bringing it to Las Vegas to be their new minor league affiliate as quickly as next season, possibly calling them the Henderson Silver Knights. While it looked to be just speculation, it looks to be true as the Chicago Sun-Times’ Brian Sandalow writes that Vegas’ current AHL affiliate, the Chicago Wolves, are expected to find a new franchise to work with starting next season.
“The Chicago Wolves will be here next season,” chairman Don Levin told the Sun-Times before the Wolves beat the Manitoba Moose 5-2 on Saturday. “But I don’t know who we’ll be affiliated with.”
Levin went on to say that there is “no scenario at all” in which the Wolves would be affiliated with the Vegas Golden Knights next season. He added that he’s heard that Vegas has talked to every independent team if they wanted to sell, but hasn’t heard whether the Golden Knights’ franchise has found a buyer.
- The Athletic’s Michael Russo (subscription required) writes that changes in Minnesota may be coming soon after the Minnesota Wild suffered an embarrassing 4-0 shutout loss to the Boston Bruins on Saturday. While the scribe is just conjecturing, he said that it might not be coincidence that the entire Minnesota front office is in town, including advisor Jack Ferreira and general manager Bill Guerin looked upset and stood for 10 straight minutes after David Pastrnak scored to give Boston a 4-0 lead. The team has quite a few issues to deal with, the most challenging is the fact that it has just one unrestricted free agent coming off the books this summer in Mikko Koivu.
- The Winnipeg Jets and general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff will soon have to make a decision about whether the team will be buyers or sellers at the trade deadline. After a big victory over the first-place Blues Saturday, The Athletic’s Murat Ates (subscription required) writes that what the Jets need more than anything is secondary scoring. The team is without their top two checkers in Adam Lowry and Mathieu Perreault, both injured, meaning instead of sending out their checking line to stop the opposing team’s top line, Winnipeg is now forced to send their top line out instead. The team needs help in its secondary scoring, although the play of Jack Roslovic of late could make quite a difference if he can keep it up. The team could have some cap room to work if it’s true that Dustin Byfuglien will miss the season due to injury.
Getting an independently owned AHL team to sell isn’t easy. A lot of those teams are firmly established in their cities and would have zero interest in selling their franchise.
LOL it was 6-1 not a 4-0 shutout loss. Seriously doesn’t somebody check this stuff before posting.
The wild lost 6-1….
On NHL.com, the Vegas-Nashville score was 3-0, next to the Boston-Minne game box. Off by one game box, and didn’t even that right…
the Golden Knights finding a buyer? I would think they need to find a seller.
Shoddy piece