International Notes: Konovalov, Zizka, Kampfer
Oilers goaltending prospect Ilya Konovalov is on the move in his native Russia. His Kontinental Hockey League player rights were traded from Dynamo Moscow to Admiral Vladivostok today, per a team release.
Konovalov, 26, is coming off a pair of spectacular seasons in the Russian capital. The 2019 third-round pick posted a .921 SV%, 2.05 GAA, three shutouts and 21-12-3 record in 42 games last season.
Konovalov spent the 2021-22 campaign in North America after signing his entry-level contract with the Oilers, but struggled amid high expectations. He only got into 17 games with AHL Bakersfield with an .893 SV%, 2.73 GAA and 5-7-5 record. He didn’t see any NHL ice, and was returned on loan to Dynamo for 2022-23.
The Oilers issued Konovalov a qualifying offer when his ELC expired, but he opted to remain with Dynamo in 2023-24. They still hold his NHL signing rights through July 13 of next year, meaning they could bring him back next offseason without competition. He doesn’t yet have a contract for 2024-25 with Vladivostok, but if he ends up signing a one-year deal, that’ll be something to watch.
In 196 career KHL games, the 2019 KHL Rookie of the Year has a 2.11 GAA, .922 SV%, 20 shutouts, and a 96-66-18 record.
Other updates from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean:
- One of the longest-tenured players in the professional ranks worldwide has called it a career. Former Kings defenseman Tomas Zizka, who last played in the NHL before the 2004-05 lockout, officially announced his retirement today, per Hokej.cz. Zizka, 44, was a sixth-round pick of the Kings in 1998 and played 25 games with them in the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons, scoring twice and adding six assists for eight points with a -8 rating. He spent the balance of his career in his native Czechia aside from a brief stint in Russia in 2004-05, playing in parts of 22 Czech Extraliga seasons with Brno, Prague and Zlin. He’d spent the last two seasons in the third-tier 2. liga with Hokej Vyskov, where he was named to this year’s All-Star Game while posting 25 points in 44 games.
- The KHL’s Traktor Chelyabinsk officially announced the signing of free agent defenseman Steven Kampfer today. The club said last month that they’d reached an agreement to bring Kampfer to Russia, but it wasn’t set in stone until now. The 35-year-old is a veteran of 231 NHL games but hasn’t suited up at the game’s highest level since 2020-21. He spent all of last season in the minors, where he captained the AHL’s Tucson Roadrunners while under contract with the Coyotes. It’ll be his second KHL season after suiting up for Ak Bars Kazan in 2021-22, when he was one of the league’s best defensemen with 30 points and a +7 rating in 46 games.
Blackhawks Sign First-Rounder Marek Vanacker
The Blackhawks have signed left wing prospect Marek Vanacker to his three-year, entry-level contract, per a team release. It carries the maximum ELC cap hit of $975K.
Vanacker, 18, was the 27th overall pick in June’s draft. Chicago acquired the selection from the Hurricanes on draft day, sending the No. 34 (Dominik Badinka) and No. 50 (Nikita Artamonov) picks the other way. He spent his draft year with the Brantford Bulldogs of the Ontario Hockey League.
Vanacker broke out as a star in Brantford last season, leading the team in scoring by a wide margin with 36 goals, 46 assists and 82 points in 68 games. The teammate of Blackhawks 2023 third-round pick Nick Lardis had just four goals in 55 games for the Bulldogs the year prior.
The strong-skating playmaker is an unlikely candidate for an NHL roster spot in the fall, though. He’ll attend training camp with the Blackhawks but will be returned to Brantford to play out the 2024-25 season. That will slide the beginning of his entry-level contract to the 2025-26 season, making him an RFA upon expiry in 2028. Vanacker is young enough that he’s eligible for an entry-level slide twice, so if he plays fewer than 10 NHL games in 2025-26, the contract may not begin until 2026-27, thus expiring as late as 2029.
Vanacker was the last of three first-round picks that Chicago made this year, joining second-overall selection Artyom Levshunov and No. 18 pick Sacha Boisvert. The former will be turning pro in the fall, while Boisvert remains unsigned ahead of his freshman season at North Dakota.
Jared McIsaac Signs With Czech Team
Free agent defenseman Jared McIsaac has signed with Czech club HC Litvinov after spending the last six years in the Red Wings organization, according to an official release. It’s a one-year deal.
McIsaac, a 24-year-old native of Nova Scotia, was a second-round pick of the Wings back in 2018 but never got the chance to make his NHL debut. The high-end passing threat battled injuries for a good chunk of his time with Detroit and spent most of his four professional seasons to date playing for their AHL affiliate in Grand Rapids.
Last season was especially tumultuous for the offensive defender. He was in and out of the lineup with Grand Rapids to begin the season, and by the time February rolled around, he’d appeared in just 15 games with a goal, three assists, and a -3 rating. That led the Wings to execute a rare mid-season loan, sending him off to Switzerland to suit up with HC Ambri-Piotta of the National League.
McIsaac’s tenure in Switzerland was unremarkable. He appeared in just three regular-season games and one playoff game for the club, averaging bottom-pairing minutes and going without a point. When Ambri-Piotta’s season ended in March, McIsaac returned to North America, but not with Grand Rapids. Detroit loaned him out to the Providence Bruins, Boston’s affiliate, to finish the season. There, McIsaac again struggled with just two assists in 10 combined regular-season and playoff games.
Given that performance, it wasn’t surprising to see the Red Wings non-tender McIsaac when his contract expired this offseason, making him a UFA. It’s not that he hasn’t shown upside at the professional level. He did have two seasons of 20-plus points with Grand Rapids in 2021-22 and 2022-23 and looked like he may still have some sort of NHL future, but things just didn’t work out for the former QMJHL All-Star and Defensive Rookie of the Year.
“Jared is a defender with great potential for power plays as well,” Litvinov manager Tomas Vrabel said. “We believe that he will be comprehensive, that is, durable in all game situations.” McIsaac joins a Litvinov club that includes former NHLers Kevin Czuczman, David Kase, and Ondrej Kase.
Salary Cap/Transactions FAQs: Performance Bonuses, Kuznetsov, Offseason Cap, More
The first installment of our Salary Cap/Transactions FAQs covers performance bonuses, buyouts for players involved in retained salary transactions, how teams navigate offseason salary cap rules, and more. If you have a question that isn’t answered here, check our FAQ callout and add yours to the comment section!
Schwa: I would love to learn more about bonuses. I understand rookie and 35+ bonuses. But how about something like Connor Brown last year – injury recovery bonuses? Also how do they affect the cap – if bonuses put you over the cap by end of playoffs, you are penalized the following season? Thanks!
Great opener. Technically, in someone like Brown’s case, they’re not injury recovery bonuses. They’re regular performance bonuses, akin to what you’d find in a 35+ contract. Usually, they’re tied to how many games a player appears in during the season or, in rarer cases, tied to other statistical benchmarks (points, playoff series wins, Cup win, etc.).
The bonuses themselves aren’t what changes, it’s the player’s eligibility that does. Obviously, a “normal” player reaching unrestricted free agency and signing a standard player contract isn’t eligible for them. But players who missed most of the prior season due to injury are eligible for performance bonuses with three key stipulations:
- They have more than 400 NHL games of experience before signing the contract AND
- They spent a minimum of 100 days on injured reserve the prior season (standard and/or long-term) AND
- They’re signing a one-year contract
That is to say – if Brown signed a multi-year deal with the Oilers last summer coming off that injury (ACL tear, I believe?), he wouldn’t have been eligible for any performance bonuses. A deal can’t be structured so that he’d have potential performance bonuses in Year 1 and none in Year 2.
And the second half of your question is correct. If a player earns a performance bonus that’s a higher value than what the team has remaining in cap space at season’s end, it’s a penalty (called a “bonus carryover”) on next season’s cap.
Grocery stick: Hurricanes and Kuznetsov did agree on a mutual termination. What if Carolina had decided to buy him out instead: Would that have any implication on the Capitals? Or would they have continued to pay him the retained money (and using a retention slot on him)?
So, there’s precedent for this – a very recent one, in fact. The Canucks bought out Oliver Ekman-Larsson last summer while he was involved in a retained salary transaction with the Coyotes. Arizona (now Utah) retains the same percentage of the buyout cost that they did on Ekman-Larsson’s initial salary, which does still use up a retention slot.
Buying out the final season of Kuznetsov’s deal would have resulted in a $3.8MM cap charge in 2024-25 and a $2MM cap charge in 2025-26, per PuckPedia’s buyout calculator. Since the Capitals were retaining 50% of Kuznetsov’s salary, they would have split the buyout costs 50/50 with the Hurricanes. Both teams would have had cap charges of $1.9MM in 2024-25 and $1MM in 2025-26.
highflyballintorightfield: How about an explanation of rules for the offseason cap hit limits, that would be sufficient to explain how and why the Capitals can comfortably be well above next season’s cap.
Teams are allowed to exceed the salary cap by 10% during the offseason. This year, with an upper limit of $88MM, that means teams can have cap hits as high as $96.8MM over the summer and still be compliant as long as they get down to $88MM by the time opening night rosters are due.
But you make an astute observation – not only are the Capitals well above next season’s cap, they’re above the 10% threshold as well with a projected cap hit of around $98.25MM, per PuckPedia.
They’ve likely done this by placing Nicklas Backstrom on offseason LTIR, a difficult but necessary move to execute to ensure offseason compliancy. It operates mostly the same as in-season LTIR in that it essentially gives the Capitals an extra $9.2MM in space to work with over the summer. But using offseason LTIR restricts a team’s LTIR pool once the season starts, as it doesn’t allow them to add to it or otherwise optimize it as long as at least one player remains on LTIR. In-season LTIR is much more flexible.
In short, the Caps are sacrificing in-season salary cap flexibility for offseason salary cap flexibility.
Zakis: Read somewhere that signing players early to ELCs helps tamp down the future AAV. How does that work? Also, what’s the difference between ELCs for high school, NCAA, CHL and European players?
It does help decrease the future cap hit/AAV of the deal by a slight amount, but only if the player is subject to an entry-level slide. That’s because signing bonuses don’t slide with the rest of the deal. Let’s look at an example.
When signing 2024 third-overall pick Beckett Sennecke to his entry-level contract last month, the Ducks gave him a $97.5K signing bonus (the maximum allowable) in each season of the deal. Let’s say Sennecke plays fewer than 10 NHL games in 2024-25, sliding the beginning of his ELC to 2025-26. His $97.5K signing bonus for 2024-25 gets paid out anyway, leaving him no signing bonus in 2027-28, which is now the final season of his contract due to the slide. That reduces the AAV of the three-year deal slightly from $975K (including base salary) to $942.5K.
In terms of the difference in how ELCs are structured across players coming from different leagues, there are none. An ELC is an ELC no matter who’s signing it. The key difference lies with who’s still eligible to receive an ELC compared to a standard player contract. If a player is coming out of a North American league, they’re no longer eligible to sign an ELC if their signing age (age on Sep. 15 of the calendar year when the deal is signed) is 25 or older. If they’re above that age threshold, they have to sign a standard player contract.
But for European players, that age limit increases to 28 or older. That’s why Isles international free agent signing Maxim Tsyplakov, whose signing age was 25, was eligible for an ELC this summer. If he was coming from a North American league, he would have needed to sign a standard one-way or two-way deal, removing his $1MM in potential performance bonuses.
Spaced-Cowboy: How often can the NTC be modified or changed in a given year. What is the full process of waiving the NTC. Is it retained after the team acquires them (pre deadline trades that result in a player being traded again; at or before the deadline) Is it always the player or can the organizations stipulate which teams are on the NTC. Does the NHL have specific language for these contracts or is it completely up to the agent/player & organization?
Full NMCs or NTCs can’t be modified, only M-NTCs can (hence the modified qualifier there). Usually, a player’s M-NTC will go into effect on July 1 each year, but sometimes a player/team can agree on a different date. Players and/or their representation need to submit their no-trade list to the team by that date. If they don’t, the M-NTC is voided. That happened with Patrik Berglund back in 2018. He had a 20-team no-trade list, but didn’t submit it to the Blues in time. The Sabres were on his no-trade that, but he was dealt to them anyway in the Ryan O’Reilly blockbuster.
If a player waives an NMC, NTC, or even M-NTC for a trade to go through, or they’re traded before it goes into effect, it remains in effect for its previously dictated duration with the acquiring team. That’s a recent change in the 2020 CBA update – it used to be that if a player was traded before an NMC or NTC went into effect, the clause would be removed unless the acquiring team agreed to keep it.
The only exception to that rule is if a player makes it clear they’re waiving the clause permanently for the trade to go through, which to my knowledge has never happened. Clauses are always waived only for the purposes of a specific transaction, and they then travel with the player after a transaction.
As for the last few parts of that question, it’s up to the player to decide the teams that comprise their M-NTC. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for you on the specific language used to stipulate clauses in contracts.
Image courtesy of USA Today Sports.
Sabres Likely To Keep Konsta Helenius In North America This Season
After going 14th overall in this summer’s draft and subsequently signing his entry-level contract, it appears Sabres prospect Konsta Helenius‘ time in his native Finland is over for the foreseeable future. Liiga club Tappara, which owns his rights, said Monday that Helenius is “looking for a place to play in the Sabres organization” this season and is unlikely to return to the club (X link).
Helenius, 18, said shortly before the draft that he wanted to move to the NHL as quickly as possible. After Buffalo signed him to his ELC early last month, Lance Lysowski of The Buffalo News reported the Sabres’ preference was to have him spend 2024-25 with AHL Rochester.
There’s a clear desire from both sides to have him suit up in North America immediately, and he’s eligible for full-time AHL assignment at such a young age as a first-round pick coming out of a European league. Because he was a first-rounder, he doesn’t need to be offered back to his Liiga team first before being assigned to the minors.
Helenius is in the unique position of already having two full professional seasons under his belt on draft day. Tappara loaned Helenius out to another Liiga club, Jukurit, for most of 2022-23 and all of 2023-24. There, he had 47 points (17 goals, 30 assists) in 84 games, including 14 goals and 22 assists for 36 points in 51 games last season. Each year, he led Liiga under-18 players in scoring.
Even if he’s playing primarily in the AHL this season, Helenius’ entry-level contract could still slide to 2025-26 if he plays fewer than 10 NHL games. After consistently averaging top-six minutes in a top-flight European professional league last season, it’s hard to imagine him having too many adjustment pains, regardless of whether his opening night is spent in Buffalo or Rochester.
Metropolitan Notes: Kolosov, Kakko, Boll
While a report last weekend indicated that Flyers goaltending prospect Alexei Kolosov told the team he wouldn’t report to AHL Lehigh Valley in the fall, general manager Daniel Brière says the team doesn’t “have any confirmation that he’s not coming back” and expects him to be their third-string netminder this season, he told Sam Carchidi of Philly Hockey Now.
Kolosov, 22, signed his entry-level contract last summer but was returned on loan to Dinamo Minsk of the Kontinental Hockey League. Only after Dinamo’s season ended was Kolosov brought over to North America, where he finished the season with an .885 SV% in only two games for Lehigh Valley.
Last weekend, sources told Tony Androckitis of Inside AHL Hockey that Kolosov felt isolated after arriving in North America, a notion Brière refuted in his interview with Carchidi. “As we know, he’s coming back for camp in September,” the GM said. “He was not left by himself, and we thought everything was going good. If he wants to play hockey, he has to come back over. He’s under contract with us, so that’s why I don’t understand all the fuss. I guess a Russian team could say they’re not going to honor the contract. But he’s under contract with the Flyers and that’s where he’s going to have to play if he wants to play hockey.”
Kolosov, a third-round pick of Philadelphia in 2021, posted a .907 SV%, 2.39 GAA and 22-21-3 record with four shutouts in 47 games for Minsk last season.
Here’s more from the Metropolitan:
- In a mailbag for The Athletic, Arthur Staple opines that Rangers winger Kaapo Kakko is stuck as a “buy-low” trade candidate after signing a one-year, $2.4MM deal for this season back in June. While Staple says there’s been some amount of documented interest in the 2019 second-overall pick on the trade market, he’s “not a player other teams are coveting.” The Finn averaged a career-low 13:17 per game under head coach Peter Laviolette last year amid the worst offensive showing of his five-year NHL resume, limited to 19 points (13 goals, six assists) in 61 games.
- While the Blue Jackets settled on their next head coach with the hiring of Dean Evason last month, it didn’t mean the rest of the coaching staff was set in stone. The Athletic’s Aaron Portzline reported a couple of weeks ago that the futures of all three of their assistants, Jared Boll, Steve McCarthy and Mark Recchi, were up in the air pending meetings with Evason. Today, Portzline confirmed that Boll’s job is safe for next season, while McCarthy’s and Recchi’s futures haven’t been decided on. The Blue Jackets were already down an assistant after opting not to renew the contract of Josef Boumedienne.
Brad Hunt Signs With AHL’s Hershey Bears
The Capitals’ AHL affiliate, the Hershey Bears, have landed veteran free agent defenseman Brad Hunt on a one-year deal, a team announcement reads. The blue liner settles for a minor-league contract after spending the last two seasons on a two-way deal with the Avalanche.
Hunt, 36 later this month, saw NHL action in 10 straight seasons from 2013-14 onward before spending all of last year in the minors. The left-shot defender’s NHL upside has always been limited because of his diminutive 5’9″, 176-lb stature, but he was one of the more offensively talented defenders available that was still unsigned.
It’s a nice move for the Capitals organization. Washington doesn’t acquire Hunt’s signing rights with today’s news, but they (or any NHL team) can still sign Hunt to a contract at any time if they wish. He adds 288 games of NHL experience to the pipeline and immediately becomes the top defenseman for a Bears team that’s won back-to-back Calder Cup championships.
Hunt spent the last two seasons captaining the Avs’ affiliate, the Colorado Eagles. Last season, he led the team in scoring with 49 points (16 goals, 33 assists) in 70 games and was named to the AHL’s year-end First All-Star Team. Dating back to his professional debut over a decade ago, Hunt has 279 points (80 goals, 199 assists) in 381 AHL games in parts of eight seasons.
His last extended run in the NHL came in the front half of his now-expired two-year deal with the Avalanche, suiting up in 47 contests for them in the 2022-23 campaign. He wasn’t given any special teams usage and averaged just 11:13 per game, but still contributed 10 points (four goals, six assists) with a +4 rating. The British Columbia native has 88 career points (26 goals, 60 assists) with a -32 rating in parts of 10 NHL seasons for the Oilers, Wild, Golden Knights, Predators, Blues, Canucks and Avs.
International Notes: Keeper, Bergman, Asselin
After spending last season on a two-way deal with the Canadiens, defenseman Brady Keeper is headed to Slovakia on a one-year deal with HK Poprad, the team announced.
Keeper, 28, was an undrafted free agent signing by the Panthers out of Maine in 2019 and stayed mostly in the minors, only suiting up for the big club twice before his entry-level contract expired in 2021. Injuries have limited him to 57 combined regular-season AHL games over the past three years, during which he’s spent time in the Canadiens and Canucks organizations.
He had a goal and three assists with 53 PIMs and a +1 rating in 22 games for Montreal’s affiliate in Laval last season. Poprad, which had the best regular-season record in the Slovak Extraliga last season, will be his first overseas stop.
Some other notable international signings to come across the wire today:
- Former Sharks prospect Julius Bergman is continuing his tour of his native Sweden, now landing with Nybro Vikings IF on a three-year contract. The 28-year-old Stockholm native had his rights dealt to the Senators and Rangers before opting to return home in 2019 after a four-year professional career spent entirely in the AHL. He’s played mostly for Swedish clubs but finished last season in Slovakia with HC Slovan Bratislava, where he had three points in 10 games. He’ll suit up for Nybro now, which plays in the second-tier HockeyAllsvenskan. The 2014 second-round pick of San Jose previously had 19 points in 75 Allsvenskan games for Karlskrona HK and Sodertalje SK.
- Center Samuel Asselin, once an undrafted free agent signing by the Bruins, is heading over to Switzerland’s HC Sierre on a two-year deal. Asselin, 26, spent last season on an AHL contract with the Islanders’ affiliate in Bridgeport after being non-tendered by Boston in 2023. He wasn’t much of a factor, contributing six goals and 16 points in 52 games on one of the AHL’s worst teams. The 5’11”, 183-lb forward will look to play a pivotal role for Sierre, which suits up in the second-tier Sky Swiss League.
Maple Leafs Sign Ben Danford To Entry-Level Contract
The Maple Leafs have signed 2024 first-round pick Ben Danford to his entry-level contract, according to a team press release. It’s a standard three-year ELC, and PuckPedia later reported the full structure of the deal, which carries a cap hit of $964K:
Year 1: $862K base salary, $95K signing bonus
Year 2: $864K base salary, $96K SB
Year 3: $877.5K base salary, $97.5K SB
Danford, 18, was the 31st overall pick in June’s draft, which the Leafs acquired in a draft-day swap with the Ducks. The 6’1″, 190-lb defenseman is coming off his second season in juniors with the Ontario Hockey League’s Oshawa Generals, where he served as an alternate captain. In 64 regular season OHL games, the agile stay-at-home defender scored just once but recorded 32 assists for 33 points, finishing third among Gens blue-liners in scoring. His +27 rating was one short of the team lead for defenders, trailing Luca Marrelli, who was selected two rounds later by the Blue Jackets.
Danford had a strong finish to the season on both sides of the puck, breaking out for four goals and six assists in 21 playoff games as Oshawa advanced to the OHL final, where they were swept by the London Knights. Still, he was drafted earlier than expected, with most (including TSN’s Bob McKenzie’s polling of NHL scouts) projecting him as a mid-to-late second-round pick.
It’s the second year in a row the Maple Leafs have taken a player earlier than expected with their first-round pick. But last year’s selection, forward Easton Cowan at 28th overall, has worked out quite well. He was instrumental in dismantling Danford’s Generals in the OHL championship, leading the league’s playoffs in scoring with 34 points in 18 games for London and being named the playoffs MVP.
Danford is a bit of a project and is likely a few years away from NHL action, so he’ll likely be heading back to Oshawa in the fall. Doing so will slide the beginning of his ELC to 2025-26, and if he plays fewer than 10 NHL games next season, the contract will slide again to 2026-27. Regardless, the right-shot defender will be an RFA upon expiry.
Michael McLeod Signs With Barys Astana
Free agent center Michael McLeod has signed a one-year contract with Kazakhstan’s Barys Astana of the Kontinental Hockey League, the team announced. The former Devil is one of five players awaiting trial after being charged with sexual assault in connection to an alleged 2018 assault involving members of the Canadian men’s national junior team. McLeod is the only one of the group facing two counts’ worth of charges, the London Police Service confirmed in January.
Four of the five players charged were signed to NHL contracts last season – McLeod, Callan Foote, Dillon Dube and Carter Hart. All were slated to become RFAs at the end of the season, but none were given qualifying offers by their respective teams, who relinquished their signing rights.
McLeod is the second player facing charges to sign a contract to play in the KHL this season. Dube signed a one-year deal with Dinamo Minsk last month.
There’s no set date for a jury trial for the five players in question yet, although it may come soon. After a virtual pre-trial hearing in June, the justice overseeing the case told the players’ legal representatives “to return to the courtroom on August 13 to ‘potentially’ firm up the dates for the jury trial” (via Ian Mendes of The Athletic).
The KHL’s preseason is already underway. The league’s regular season starts in early September.
McLeod, who the Devils drafted 12th overall in 2016, had 19 points (10 goals, nine assists) in 45 games last season before taking leave from the team in advance of the charges.