Snapshots: Hartley, Penguins, Desnoyers, Army

Long-time NHL head coach Bob Hartley has decided to return to coaching.  The KHL announced (Twitter link) that Hartley has been hired by Lokomotiv Yaroslavl as their new bench boss.  The 64-year-old will be making his second foray into coaching in Russia having spent four seasons coaching Avangard Omsk before leaving them in 2022; he hadn’t coached anywhere since then.  Hartley is also a veteran of 944 NHL games between Colorado, Atlanta, and Calgary with his teams playing to a .556 points percentage.  He won the Stanley Cup back in 2001 but only made the playoffs in three of ten seasons after that.

Elsewhere around the hockey world:

• While Fenway Sports Group has said that they’re only interested in selling a small portion of the Penguins, their old ownership group continues to look into the possibility of one day buying a controlling stake, reports Josh Yohe of The Athletic (subscription link). The group, led by long-time Penguin legend Mario Lemieux, sold the team back in 2021 with a franchise valuation of $900MM.  Since then, franchise values have gone up with Forbes recently pegging the team’s value at nearly double that amount so re-acquiring even a controlling interest in the team might be costlier than what they received for it not quite four years ago.
• The Wild’s AHL team in Iowa announced that they’ve signed forward Elliot Desnoyers to a one-year, one-way contract. The 23-year-old has four career NHL games under his belt, coming with Philadelphia back in 2022-23.  Since then, Desnoyers has played exclusively in the AHL and had 19 points in 59 games which wasn’t enough to earn a qualifying offer last month.
• The Avalanche’s AHL affiliate announced the hiring of Derek Army as an assistant coach. The 34-year-old spent parts of the last five seasons as head coach of ECHL Wheeling, becoming the winningest coach in franchise history with a 153-137-19 record over that stretch.  Army also spent the past four seasons as their Director of Hockey Operations but will now focus exclusively on coaching with the Eagles.