Morning Notes: Robertson, Pinto, Varone
In this early stretch of the 2025-26 NHL season, one of the better storylines on the New York Rangers has been the emergence of rookie defenseman Matthew Robertson, who scored his first NHL goal last night in the team’s much-needed comeback victory over the Montreal Canadiens. Robertson took on injured defenseman Carson Soucy‘s role as the Rangers’ number-five defenseman, and while he hasn’t been perfect, he has generally impressed. This has led to questions as to what will happen when Soucy is ready to return to the lineup, and The Athletic’s Peter Baugh wrote yesterday that it “definitely feels like” Robertson will retain a spot in head coach Mike Sullivan’s regular lineup once Soucy returns.
Should Robertson end up retaining his regular lineup spot, that would likely mean veteran Urho Vaakanainen would become the team’s seventh defenseman, filling the role Robertson began the season in. Vaakanainen, 26, is averaging the fewest minutes per game of any Rangers blueliner (15:02) though he has played in all seven of the team’s games thus far this season. The stay-at-home defenseman has an additional year on his contract beyond this one at a $1.55MM AAV, and managed a healthy 15 points in 46 games for the Rangers last season. Vaakanainen’s play has drawn more criticism than Robertson’s this year, though, and being on the wrong end of a Trent Frederic game-winning goal on Tuesday didn’t help his case to stay in the lineup.
Other notes from around the hockey world:
- Yesterday, we covered reports coming out of Ottawa that Senators center Shane Pinto and the team were set to re-engage in talks over a contract extension for the talented young center. Those reports indicated that there was a notable gap between the Senators’ expectations for a new contract and the expectations of Pinto’s representatives, led by Lewis Gross of Sports Professional Management. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman added to the reporting around Pinto last night, revealing that the Senators had offered Pinto an eight-year contract extension. It’s unclear at this time whether Pinto and the Senators will be able to reach an agreement on such a long-term contract (Pinto’s goal-scoring success so far this season should certainly embolden his camp’s pursuit of a major pay raise) but as of right now, it’s abundantly clear the Senators are hoping to keep Pinto in the fold for as long as possible.
- Former AHL MVP Phil Varone has found a place to play the 2025-26 season, signing a contract with Slovakia’s HK Dukla Trencin. The 34-year-old, who was once one of the top players in the AHL and has 97 career NHL games to his name, has landed in Slovakia after a two-year stint in Germany’s DEL. Since leaving North America at the end of a 2019-20 season that saw him post 19 points in 33 AHL games, Varone has struggled to find consistency in Europe. He’s bounced between six different clubs over the last five years across three different leagues and four different countries, with his best year coming in 2023-24, when he scored 27 points in 34 games for the DEL’s Düsseldorfer EG. He now joins a Trencin team in desperate need of scoring reinforcement: the team currently sit in the No. 8 spot in the Slovak Extraliga standings (out of 12 teams) and have scored the third-fewest goals as a team (27 through 12 games played).
DEL’s Grizzlys Wolfsburg Sign Phil Varone
The Grizzlys Wolfsburg of the Deutsche Eishockey Liga have signed veteran forward Phil Varone to a one-year deal, the team announced. This will mark Varone’s second straight season in Germany after he spent 2023-24 with Düsseldorfer EG.
Varone continued to serve as a top-flight scoring threat in leagues outside the NHL, posting 11 goals and 16 assists for 27 points in 34 games for Düsseldorf until his season ended in early January due to injury. His 0.79 points per game were right around his AHL career average and were his best in a single season since taking his talents overseas four years ago.
The speedy but undersized 33-year-old likely could have landed a two-way NHL contract this summer from a team looking to boost its organizational depth and add an experienced call-up option but will instead opt for some more stability in Germany. He hasn’t played in the same country in back-to-back seasons since his two campaigns with the Flyers organization in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
A fifth-round pick of the Sharks in 2009, Varone had 415 points in 521 career games in the AHL, playing in the Buffalo, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Montreal and Pittsburgh organizations before packing up for Europe. He logged NHL time with the first three, scoring eight goals and 17 points across 97 career appearances between 2013-14 and 2018-19. Varone never signed his entry-level pact with San Jose, instead becoming a free agent and later landing with the Sabres on an ELC in 2012.
While he was never a true NHL regular, he did challenge for the role with Philly in the 2018-19 campaign, playing in more than half of his NHL team’s games for the only time in his career with seven points in 47 appearances in a fourth-line role. He was coming off a 23-goal, 70-point campaign in 74 games with AHL Lehigh Valley the year prior that earned him AHL First All-Star Team honors as well as the Les Cunningham Award for league MVP. Since last suiting up in the AHL in 2019-20, he’s played for the KHL’s Barys Nur-Sultan and Spartak Moskva, as well as the Swiss National League’s Lausanne HC and SC Bern in addition to his time in Germany.