TVA’s Renaud Lavoie reports the Calgary Flames have signed defenseman Nicolas Meloche to a one-year, $950,000 deal. He isn’t the only depth defenseman they’ll add though, as Dennis Gilbert is also on his way there with a two-year, one-way contract according to his agency.
Meloche, 24, spent most of last season with the San Jose Sharks, getting into 50 games as well as 10 for the AHL’s San Jose Barracuda. Meloche averaged 16:53 time-on-ice per game on a bad San Jose squad and even got some time on the team’s penalty kill unit.
The former QMJHL star defenseman came to the Sharks organization through a 2019 trade, and worked his way from reliable AHL defenseman to NHL priority call-up. It’s unlikely that the Flames rely on Meloche as heavily as the Sharks did, but he could fit in nicely as the team’s seventh defenseman, maybe even seeing bottom-pairing minutes in the roles vacated by Erik Gudbranson and Nikita Zadorov’s departures.
Gilbert, 25, was a third-round pick at the 2015 draft and spent 2021-22 manning the blueline for the Colorado Eagles of the AHL. Gilbert had 23 points in 52 games and has 25 games of NHL experience to his name. The big six-foot-two, 216-pound native of Buffalo, New York should help improve the Flames’ organizational depth and could maybe provide a few games at the NHL level on injury fill-in duty.