Henrik Lundqvist Announces Retirement
After heart surgery took him off the ice last season, Henrik Lundqvist has decided enough is enough. The legendary goaltender has announced his retirement, thanking all the people that have been part of his career over the last few decades.
From the excitement I felt as an 8-year old at my first practice to the 15 years of butterflies I had every time I took the ice in the greatest city in the world. I’m extremely grateful for what hockey has brought me and taught me in life. These lessons will never leave me.
In the end, Lundqvist will have played every single game of his NHL career in a New York Rangers sweater after all. After 15 years with the organization, he attempted to play a year with the Washington Capitals in 2020-21, but after a heart issue was discovered in offseason training, that never happened. Now 39, Lundqvist will hang up his pads after 887 regular season appearances.
That’s good enough for eighth all-time, though Lundqvist will likely be passed by Marc-Andre Fleury this season. He sits sixth all-time in wins and finished in the top-six for Vezina Trophy voting for ten straight seasons to start his career. He took home the award in 2012 after posting a .930 save percentage in 62 appearances, finishing third in Hart Trophy voting that year as well. One of the best of his generation, Lundqvist was never able to raise the Stanley Cup but did Olympic and World Championship gold as part of Team Sweden.
Even without any championships, Lundqvist is heading to the Hall of Fame as the unquestioned greatest Swedish goaltender of all time. He’ll finish his career with a 459-310-96 record, with 64 shutouts.
A little later in the morning, the Rangers made their own announcement. This season, Lundqvist’s jersey will be raised to the rafters at Madison Square Garden and his No. 30 will be retired from use.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports
PHR Live Chat Transcript: 08/19/21
Click here to read a transcript of this week’s live chat with PHR’s Gavin Lee.
Glendale Will Not Renew Arena Agreement With Arizona Coyotes
The city of Glendale, Arizona, home of the Arizona Coyotes, has decided to not renew the operating agreement for Gila River Arena after the 2021-22 season. This essentially is the city kicking the Coyotes out of the rink, with a statement from Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps making it quite clear that the partnership is ending:
We are thankful to the NHL and the Arizona Coyotes for being part of the Glendale community for the past 18 years. The decision to not renew the operating agreement with the Coyotes was not made overnight or in a vacuum. We carefully weighed input from key stakeholders, our expert economist, our arena management firm and our City Council.
In a follow-up report, Katie Strang of The Athletic has Phelps on record explaining that they have “reached that point of no return” and examines the large debts that the franchise owed as of July 29. The city had agreed to forgo an amount owed from last year due to the pandemic affecting the team’s financial situation, as long as the Coyotes agreed to “keep current with all future financial obligations,” which has apparently not occurred.
It is not at all clear what the next step is for the Coyotes. Finding another arena in the area will be difficult, and there have been obvious pushes in the past by places like Quebec City and Houston. The NHL’s long-standing position has been to try and keep the Coyotes in Arizona, but this is just another setback in that goal. Previously, the team has indicated a desire to pursue a new arena deal in Tempe, and the original deadline for proposals was today. That was recently delayed until September 2, and there are considerable hurdles for that plan as well. Phelps told Strang that the Tempe interest was not the reason for the decision to terminate the Glendale arrangement. For now, the team will play out the 2021-22 season in Gila River Arena and Glendale, but their future beyond that is extremely murky.
The Coyotes released a statement a few hours later:
We are disappointed by today’s unilateral decision by the City of Glendale to break off negotiations on a multi-year lease extension agreement. We are hopeful that they will reconsider a move that would primarily damage the small businesses and hard-working citizens of Glendale. We remain open to restarting good-faith negotiations with the City.
Most importantly, the Coyotes are one hundred percent committed to finding a long-term arena solution here in Arizona, and nothing will shake our determination to do what is right for our organization, residents of the entire Valley and, most important, our fans.
Pat Verbeek Named AHL GM
After the news that Ryan Martin would be leaving the Detroit Red Wings organization to take a job with the New York Rangers, there was an opening that needed to be filled. The Grand Rapids Griffins, Detroit’s AHL affiliate, was left without a general manager. Instead of hiring someone new for the job, the Red Wings have decided to pass the reins to Pat Verbeek, one of the team’s current assistant general managers. Verbeek will continue in his role as AGM for the Red Wings, but take on this new challenge leading the Griffins.
He released a statement on the new opportunity:
The Griffins are a first-class organization, and Grand Rapids is a fantastic market for hockey. Both of those factors are critical in the successful development of prospects in the American Hockey League and the ability to help them get to the next level. I look forward to continuing the winning culture in Grand Rapids and providing our prospects every necessary resource to develop as professionals and become impactful players in the NHL.
Grand Rapids won the Calder Cup in both 2013 and 2017, both with Martin attached in some management fashion. He served as AGM during the first championship and GM for the second, bringing an experienced voice to the table for more than a decade. Now Verbeek’s challenge will be continuing that history of success, while taking on a role that moves him one step closer to being an NHL GM one day.
Remember, Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman brought Verbeek over from the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2019, where he had previously served as AGM and director of player personnel. The two have basically been inseparable during their time in management, as Verbeek first joined the Red Wings scouting department in 2006, the same year Yzerman retired and moved into the Detroit front office. While Julien BriseBois was perhaps the “right-hand man” in Tampa Bay and the obvious choice to take over when Yzerman left the Lightning, Verbeek’s role shouldn’t be overlooked. He’ll now take over the minor league operations, a new step on his management journey.
Minor Transactions: 08/19/21
Another day, another set of minor league, junior and European teams filling out their rosters for the upcoming season. As always, we’ll keep track of the notable moves right here:
- As expected, Sasha Pastujov has committed to the Guelph Storm for the upcoming season. Instead of going to the University of Notre Dame as originally planned, Pastujov signed his entry-level contract with the Anaheim Ducks and will play in the OHL this season. The third-round pick has huge offensive upside and very well could be one of the top scoring threats in the OHL, depending on linemates and team strength.
- Garrett Wilson has signed an AHL deal with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms for 2021-22, meaning he’ll be spending another season entirely in the minor leagues. The 30-year-old forward has 94 games of NHL experience including 54 during the 2018-19 season, but has played the last two exclusively in the AHL. Last year with the Phantoms, he had just one goal and nine assists in 27 games.
- Kale Howarth has signed an AHL deal with the Rockford IceHogs, after becoming an unrestricted free agent a few days ago. By not reaching an entry-level deal with the Columbus Blue Jackets, who drafted Howarth 148th overall in 2017, he hit the open market and was free to sign anywhere. The 24-year-old played three seasons at the University of Connecticut, scoring five goals and seven points in 18 games this year.
- The Springfield Thunderbirds have signed Shawn Cameron and Nic Pierog to one-year AHL deals, bringing aboard the pair of ECHL talents. Cameron had ten points in 23 games for the Greenville Swamp Rabbits last season, also seeing some time with the Utica Comets, while Pierog finished among the league leaders with 45 points in 61 games for the Indy Fuel.
- After being left unqualified by the Florida Panthers, Jake Massie has signed an ECHL contract with the South Carolina Stingrays. The 24-year-old was signed out of college but was never even able to establish himself at the AHL level, spending last season entirely with Greenville.
- The Iowa Wild have signed Doyle Somerby to a one-year AHL deal, after he split last season between the Stingrays and the Tucson Roadrunners. In 24 games with Tucson, the big defenseman recorded one goal and seven points.
This page will be updated throughout the day
Roster Crunch Coming For Seattle Kraken
The Vegas Golden Knights expansion draft took place on June 21, 2017. That night, the league announced ten trades that the Golden Knights had made with expansion draft considerations in mind, but they weren’t done there. Over the next two weeks, they completed seven more trades to fix the roster construction. After all, an expansion process usually doesn’t leave you with a perfect mix of players, and free agent frenzy had also provided some opportunities to add to that initial group.
Starting with Trevor van Riemsdyk, the Golden Knights shed the extra defensemen they selected in the expansion draft, collecting a number of draft picks in the process. There was van Riemsdyk, David Schlemko, Marc Methot, and Alexei Emelin to move, since they simply couldn’t keep all the NHL defensemen that were targeted in the draft.
The Seattle Kraken, now nearly a month after their own expansion draft, have made three trades. One of those was to send goaltender Vitek Vanecek back to his original team, while Kurtis MacDermid and Tyler Pitlick were also flipped for fourth-round picks. But the problem that Vegas faced four years ago now faces Seattle as well–there are still just too many defensemen.
Not even counting Dennis Cholowski, who is currently an unsigned restricted free agent the Kraken have ten defensemen under contract for the 2021-22 season. None of them, not even 22-year-old Cale Fleury, are waiver-exempt. That means unless they’re going to carry more defensemen than any other team in the league this season (even playing a couple of them at forward) some will have to be either traded or exposed on waivers before the season begins. Sure, Connor Carrick, the team’s lone defensive free agent signing can likely clear without worry after a disappointing season in New Jersey, but even he has 241 games of NHL experience. None of the other defensemen are risk-free when it comes to waivers, meaning something has to give in the next few months.
The odd balance here is that, even though they’re facing a roster crunch, the actual depth chart isn’t very long. Because the Kraken won’t have a full-time minor league affiliate this season and are just sending a handful of players to the Charlotte Checkers, the list of defensemen actually ends at Carrick–number ten on the chart (until Cholowski is signed). A few training camp injuries and suddenly you’re looking extremely thin on the back end, scrambling for some insurance options just to make an active roster. While that situation might solve the issue of waivers for a while, when those players healed the Kraken would be in trouble once again, having to push players through midseason. Worse, what if they were to lose one or two players on waivers and then suffer a few injuries in the early part of the season?
A potential fix is to sign a few more players like Carrick—with NHL experience but likely to clear waivers at the start of the season—while also trading a few of the current options in the meantime. The problem is that many of the league’s teams have basically locked their rosters and may not be jumping to trade for another defenseman after spending in free agency. Perhaps the plan is to wait for training camp injuries to happen around the league, but it is a tricky situation that Seattle finds themselves in right now, with a risky depth chart that essentially is both too full and too short at the same time.
Latest On Zdeno Chara
With one more full season, Zdeno Chara would take the lead among all NHL defensemen in career games played. He currently sits in fifth, just 43 games behind the leader Chris Chelios, who played until he was 48. Chara isn’t quite that old at 44, and is coming off a relatively effective season with the Washington Capitals. If he intends on playing again this season as expected, there’s an old rival interested in his services. According to Jeremy Rutherford of The Athletic, the St. Louis Blues have expressed interest in Chara, as they did in the 2020 offseason before he signed with the Capitals.
Chara and the Blues know each other very well from their 2019 Stanley Cup Final, which went the full seven games and resulted in St. Louis’ first franchise championship. As usual, the veteran defenseman was dealing with injuries by the time the title series came around—this time playing with a broken jaw—but still managed three points in the seven games. Chara is up to 200 playoff games in his career, but hasn’t been able to hoist the trophy since 2011.
It also wouldn’t be the first defenseman from that 2019 series that the Blues would be targeting; they signed Torey Krug to a seven-year, $45.5MM contract last fall after losing captain Alex Pietrangelo to free agency. But as Rutherford writes, Chara is a long-shot for the Blues, as the veteran defenseman would like to stay as close to his family in Boston as possible with everything else equal.
There is still a place for Chara in the league, as a defenseman that is deployed almost solely in the defensive zone and on the penalty kill, but he’s obviously not what he used to be. He agreed to a one-year deal last season that paid him just $795K in base salary with another $730K in potential performance bonuses, but even that may be more than he gets this time around. He averaged just over 18 minutes this season for the Capitals, the first time since 1999 that he was under the 21-minute mark over a full season.
Minor Transactions: 08/18/21
While we wait for news on some of the big trade targets still on the market, the NHL hot stove has cooled significantly. Still, European and minor leagues continue to fill their rosters and tweak lineups in preparation for a full season. As always, we’ll keep track of the notable minor moves right here.
- The Rochester Americans have signed Dominic Franco, Mitch Eliot, Nick Boka, and Matthews Cairns to one-year AHL contracts for the upcoming season. If you recognize Cairns name, it might be because he was a third-round pick of the Edmonton Oilers in 2016 whose draft rights expired this month. The 23-year-old defenseman never did develop any offense while in college, scoring just three goals and 12 points in his four seasons.
- Josh Wilkins, who played most of last season with the Tucson Roadrunners, is heading to Sweden after signing with Vasterviks IK. He did not receive a qualifying offer from the Nashville Predators at the end of the year, making him an unrestricted free agent. In 25 games with Tucson, he scored five points.
- This season, Keegan Lowe is off to Italy to play for HC Bolzano after a long career in the minor leagues. The son of six-time Stanley Cup champion and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee Kevin Lowe, Keegan managed just four appearances at the NHL level. He played this season with the San Diego Gulls, recording six points in 44 games.
- The Toronto Marlies have signed former Chicago Steel captain Matteo Pietroniro to a one-year AHL contract. The 22-year-old defenseman spent last season in the ICEHL with HC Bolzano, recording four points in 31 games. Toronto happens to have just hired Ryan Hardy as senior director of minor league operations, who was GM of the Steel in 2018-19 when Pietroniro wore the “C.”
This page will be updated throughout the day
Marc Michaelis Signs AHL Contract
Last offseason, one of the interesting undrafted college free agents on the market was Marc Michaelis. He was coming off an outstanding career at Minnesota State-Mankato, which ended with him as a top-ten finalist for the Hobey Baker Award. The German-born forward is second on the school’s all-time career scoring list with 162 points in 148 games, including an outstanding 20 goals and 44 points in his 31-game senior season.
When the Canucks signed him, it appeared as though they had a pro-ready bottom-six talent who could help on the penalty kill and add some secondary scoring. After all, Michaelis had set a school record with ten career short-handed goals and had even played well at the 2019 IIHF World Championship for Germany. Instead, the college star failed to score a single point in 15 games with Vancouver, registering only three shots on goal. He averaged nine minutes a night and was never used on the penalty kill.
This offseason Michaelis, now 26, was not issued a qualifying offer when his one-year deal expired. That made him an unrestricted free agent once again, but came with a much more unsuccessful recent history. He’ll get a chance to rebuild his stock in the minor leagues, as the Toronto Marlies have signed Michaelis to a one-year AHL contract.
This isn’t a prospect that the Marlies are signing, but it is still one with an uncertain ceiling. After 15 games playing limited minutes, most often skating with Jayce Hawryluk and Tyler Graovac, it’s still not entirely clear that Michaelis can’t handle the NHL. If he can show an ability to dominate the minor leagues like he did the college ranks, there could very well be another NHL contract in his future.
Mikael Hakkarainen Placed On Unconditional Waivers
The Vegas Golden Knights have placed Mikael Hakkarainen on unconditional waivers for the purpose of a mutual contract termination, according to CapFriendly. Hakkarainen was the sole return for Marc-Andre Fleury in a trade with the Chicago Blackhawks earlier this summer, though even the press release at the time indicated that he would remain with the Rockford IceHogs instead of joining the Henderson Silver Knights. Now he won’t even be under contract with the Golden Knights, becoming an unrestricted free agent when the termination goes through tomorrow.
Hakkarainen, 23, had one year left on his entry-level contract but had struggled to find playing time in the Blackhawks minor league system. This season he split the year between the Indy Fuel of the ECHL and Rockford, playing six games for each. In those contests, the fifth-round pick recorded just a single assist. His time in the AHL could be over, as he failed to score a single point in 14 games for the IceHogs since joining them in 2019.
He will be free to sign anywhere, though it’s unclear where his professional future lies at this point. A return to Finland perhaps, though he hasn’t played there since the 2014-15 campaign. Hakkarainen was the 139th overall pick in 2018, after spending two seasons in the USHL.
With Hakkarainen now set for release, the Golden Knights officially have nothing but cap space to show for the Fleury trade.