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Golden Knights Reassign Jaycob Megna

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According to a team announcement, the Vegas Golden Knights have reassigned defenseman Jaycob Megna to the AHL’s Henderson Silver Knights. The move is likely for salary cap purposes since the Golden Knights don’t play again until Friday.

For the time being, that leaves Vegas with six defensemen on the active roster, with no indication that Noah Hanifin is expected to return soon. Since the Silver Knights play the Ontario Reign this evening, Megna will be able to fulfill the one-game requirement in the AHL to make him eligible to return as a depth piece for the Golden Knights on Halloween.

Despite being on the roster for the last week, Megna has yet to play for Vegas this year. Excluding preseason action, Megna’s last NHL contest came over half a year ago with the Florida Panthers.

Thus, most of his professional playing days have been spent in the AHL. He’s coming off one of the best seasons of his professional career, scoring two goals and 16 points in 64 games for the Charlotte Checkers with a +26 rating. He’s already appeared in four games with AHL Henderson this year, tallying one assist with a +2 rating.

Vegas may choose to provide Megna with more consistency and recall Dylan Coghlan in his stead later this week. Still, since he can spend another 23 days on the roster before needing waivers again, expect Megna to rejoin the Golden Knights against the Colorado Avalanche on Friday.

Avalanche Assign Trent Miner To AHL

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Oct. 29th: Colorado announced that they’ve reassigned Miner to the AHL’s Colorado Eagles, indirectly confirming he made it through waivers unscathed.

Oct. 28th: The Avalanche placed goaltender Trent Miner on waivers today, Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet reports. He’ll head to AHL Colorado if he clears.

While doing so will open a roster spot, that’s not of concern to the Avs, as they already have one. It instead ushers the formal return of starting netminder Mackenzie Blackwood, who will be backing up Scott Wedgewood tonight as he’s healthy enough to dress for the first time this season, per Bailey Curtis of DNVR Sports. He’s missed 10 games with a lower-body issue and has continued to sit out after being recalled from his conditioning loan to the AHL over a week ago.

Only recently has Miner played a factor in Blackwood’s absence. He played two of the last three, one in early relief and one as a start, for Colorado to give the overtaxed Wedgewood some rest. The veteran backup performed as well as could be hoped for in spot-starting duty, logging a 5-1-2 record and a .904 SV% with a 2.42 GAA in nine appearances. He’s faltered recently, though, logging a 0-1-1 record and .825 SV% in his last three outings. That explained Colorado’s decision to give Miner his first start of the season and second of his career in Sunday’s overtime loss to the Devils. In his two appearances this month, the 24-year-old managed a 0-0-2 record with a .909 SV% and 2.12 GAA. He saved one goal above expected, per MoneyPuck.

The Avs’ third-stringer now returns to the AHL – assuming he clears waivers – where he had great success last season. The 2019 seventh-round pick made a career-high 38 appearances for the Eagles and came away with a 22-10-9 record, .918 SV%, 2.12 GAA, and three shutouts. His solid showing in brief NHL action this year likely quiets any concerns that may have existed about Miner being a capable No. 3 option.

While Miner’s recent numbers may generate some interest on the wire, he’s still under contract through 2026-27. While he’s on a league-minimum, two-way deal, that could be enough to dissuade any potential claimers.

Kraken Reassign John Hayden

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The Kraken have reassigned forward John Hayden to the AHL’s Coachella Valley Firebirds, according to a team announcement on Wednesday. They now have an open roster spot, which could be filled by one of their four injured reserve-bound players. That would most likely be Kaapo Kakko, who has yet to play in the regular season due to a fractured hand but was upgraded to day-to-day last weekend, head coach Lane Lambert said (via Kate Shefte of the Seattle Times).

Hayden, 30, started the season with the Firebirds after clearing waivers but was recalled to Seattle on Oct. 17. The move came in the wake of an IR placement for center Frédérick Gaudreau, who’s still got a few weeks to go in his recovery from an upper-body issue. Hayden played in three straight games to begin his recall, but came out of the lineup last week and hasn’t played since, sitting in the press box for Seattle’s last three. He’s been succeeded as Seattle’s interim fourth-line center by Ben Meyers, who was brought up a few days after Hayden’s recall in the wake of an injury to Jared McCann.

In his three NHL games this season, Hayden had a minus-one rating and saw 10:05 of ice time per contest. The veteran of 272 career games went 6-for-15 on faceoffs (40%) and recorded two blocks and seven hits. The call-up marked the 10th consecutive season of big-league action for Hayden, arguably the epitome of an NHL/AHL tweener with over 180 games to his name at the minor-league level as well.

Hayden, an alternate captain with the Firebirds, only got into one game for them before being summoned to the Kraken. Now in his fourth year in the organization, he’ll look to get his season underway in earnest after posting an 11-16–27 scoring line in 44 games for Coachella Valley last year. He can remain on the roster for up to 18 days on future recalls before he needs waivers again to head back to the AHL.

Canucks Reassign Nils Åman, Recall Mackenzie MacEachern

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The Canucks have assigned center Nils Åman to the AHL’s Abbotsford Canucks and recalled winger Mackenzie MacEachern from Abbotsford in a corresponding transaction, according to a team announcement on Wednesday. The swap saves them $50,000 in cap space, although they’re not accruing anything at the moment by using long-term injured reserve to keep them compliant.

Åman cleared waivers at the beginning of the season and began the year in the minors. The 25-year-old center, now in his fourth season in the Canucks organization, had three assists and a minus-five rating in four games with Abbotsford. He was recalled early last week in the wake of Filip Chytil’s upper-body injury that’s still keeping him out of the lineup.

The Swedish pivot played in Vancouver’s first two games following his recall, making appearances on Oct. 21 against the Penguins and Oct. 23 against the Predators. He averaged just 8:40 of ice time per game and was held off the scoresheet, skating on the wing in a fourth-line role. He’s now been a healthy scratch in three straight following the team’s acquisition of Lukas Reichel from the Blackhawks.

The longer the Canucks keep Åman on the active roster, the more time burns off his temporary waiver exemption. As such, after swallowing up nine days of his 30-day allowance on the roster after clearing waivers at the beginning of the month, they’ll swap him out to stop the clock.

Up comes MacEachern, who, like Åman, has north of 100 games of NHL experience. He hasn’t appeared in a big-league game since December 2023 with the Blues, though. The 31-year-old signed a two-year, two-way contract with Vancouver this summer after spending the prior two years in St. Louis. It was his second stint with the Blues, who drafted him in the third round in 2012 and have been his home for eight of his 10 professional seasons.

While usually a productive minor-league force, MacEachern has struggled heavily in his first few weeks with Abbotsford. He’s been limited to two goals and no assists in seven games while carrying a team-worst minus-nine rating. It’s been a tough start on the whole for the reigning Calder Cup Champions, though. They’re 2-5-0 through seven games and have only scored 12 goals.

Stars Sign Thomas Harley To Eight-Year Extension

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Oct. 29: Harley’s extension has been finalized at a total value of $84.7MM with a cap hit of $10.587MM, PuckPedia reports. The contract includes a no-movement clause from the 2029-30 through 2033-34 seasons, the last five the deal covers. His year-by-year breakdown is as follows:

2026-27: $9MM base salary, $4MM signing bonus
2027-28: $9MM base salary, $2MM signing bonus
2028-29: ”
2029-30: $7,939,200 base salary, $2MM signing bonus
2030-31: ”
2031-32: ”
2032-33: $8,939,200 base salary, $1MM signing bonus
2033-34: ”

Oct. 28: According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, the Dallas Stars have made significant progress on an extension for defenseman Thomas Harley. Friedman believes that the extension will likely be an eight-year, $84MM ($10.5MM AAV) agreement and is expected to occur relatively soon.

It’s a significant agreement for a negotiation that had plenty of question marks. Harley has been a high-scoring blueliner for the Stars over the past three years, but the team was reportedly hesitant to pay him more than Miro Heiskanen’s $8.45MM salary.

Considering how much the upper limit of the salary cap has grown since Heiskanen signed his extension in 2021, there was little chance the Stars would get him at or below $8.5MM. To add more context, Heiskanen’s deal in 2021-22 accounted for 10.37% of Dallas’ available salary cap space, and Harley’s reported $10.5MM salary beginning in 2026-27 would only account for 10.1%, technically making Harley more affordable.

There is little argument that Harley isn’t deserving of the price tag. Since the beginning of the 2023-24 campaign, when Harley became a full-time member of the Stars’ blueline, he has scored 32 goals and 105 points in 166 games for the Stars, with another four goals and 18 points in 37 postseason contests. That makes him the 15th-highest scoring defenseman in the NHL over the last three years, and he’s only 24 years old.

Additionally, he’s earned a +57 rating, 53.3% CorsiFor% at even strength, and 90.8% on-ice save percentage at even strength over that stretch. Not only can he significantly contribute offensively in the NHL, but he’s also an above-average player on the defensive side of the puck.

While there are few concerns about Harley’s projections for the contract’s duration, Dallas’ salary cap situation should raise some red flags. After factoring in the purported deal, the Stars would enter the summer with approximately $17MM in cap space. Although some players, such as Adam Erne and Nathan Bastian, are easily replaceable, the Stars will face challenges keeping Jason Robertson, Mavrik Bourque, and Nils Lundkvist around on long-term deals with that cap space.

Regardless, General Manager Jim Nill should be commended for locking in the team’s core for the foreseeable future. Mikko Rantanen, Roope Hintz, Wyatt Johnston, Esa Lindell, Jake Oettinger, Heiskanen, and now Harley all signed through the 2029-30 season at the very least, guaranteeing Dallas a competitive roster into the next decade.

Photo courtesy of Jerome Miron-Imagn Images. 

Lightning Reassign Mitchell Chaffee, Scott Sabourin

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Oct. 29: The Lightning announced Wednesday that they’ve reassigned Sabourin to Syracuse. With his suspension now served, he’s unlikely to see another stint on the NHL roster in the near future.

Oct. 28: The Tampa Bay Lightning have recalled forward Scott Sabourin and assigned forward Mitchell Chaffee to the AHL. Chaffee cleared waivers earlier on Tuesday. Sabourin will serve the final game of a four-game suspension picked up during the preseason, making him eligible to return to the NHL lineup as soon as Thursday.

Tampa Bay has been strategic with its call-ups of Sabourin. He served his suspension gradually, over multiple call-ups, while also appearing in five games for the AHL’s Syracuse Crunch. He’s racked up two points, seven penalty minutes, and a plus-two in those appearances. It’s a relatively meager stat line for the usually-chippy Sabourin, who ranked second on the San Jose Barracuda with 111 penalty minutes in 65 games last season. He led the Barracuda with 192 PIMs in 2024 and led the Belleville Senators with 177 PIMs in 2023.

Sabourin has played in only 12 NHL games since his rookie season ended in 2020. He has two points and 25 PIMs in his limited appearances. He’s otherwise been a core piece of lineups across the AHL, offering imposing size and an old-school enforcer style. Tampa Bay could lean on that hard-nosed presence to turn around its 3-4-2 start to the season, though Sabourin would need to leapfrog Yanni Gourde or Dominic James to crack into the Lightning lineup.

Meanwhile, Chaffee will head to the minor leagues after appearing in the first seven games of Tampa Bay’s season. He recorded no scoring and 19 hits in those appearances. This move will push Chaffee towards his first AHL games since the 2023-24 season, when he posted 26 points in 36 AHL games and seven points in 30 NHL games. That scoring was enough to earn the Michigan-native a full season with the Lightning last year. He marked it with 12 goals and 18 points in 66 games, though he couldn’t keep that scoring up through this season. Chaffee has 25 points in 105 career NHL games and 89 points in 123 career AHL appearances.

Blues Recall Dalibor Dvorsky

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The Blues announced they’ve recalled their top center prospect, Dalibor Dvorsky, from the AHL’s Springfield Thunderbirds. St. Louis has an open roster spot after placing Jake Neighbours on injured reserve yesterday, so there’s no need for a corresponding transaction.

Dvorsky, the No. 10 overall pick in the 2023 draft, gets his first look of the season as the Blues deal with injuries to a pair of top-line forwards. Not only is Neighbours out for the next five weeks with a right leg injury, but their top center, Robert Thomas, has also missed the last two games with an upper-body injury and remains day-to-day.

Amid those injuries, the Blues have lost four games in a row and are 3-6-1 in their last 10 outings. It’s their goaltending that has been lacking. The Blues’ 4.40 goals against per game is 31st in the league, yet they’re allowing the fifth-fewest shots per game (25.4) in the NHL. Jordan Binnington and Joel Hofer are both among the six worst goaltenders in the league this season in terms of goals saved above expected, per MoneyPuck, combining for a -10.4 GSAx mark.

Dvorsky’s presence obviously won’t change the picture between the pipes, but they’re hoping his infusion into the roster can at least help them make strides toward outscoring their problems and get back in the win column. The Slovak pivot is off to a hot start with Springfield, scoring three goals and two assists for five points through six games. That’s tied for the team lead and marks a promising start to his second year in the North American pros. Last season, the 20-year-old churned out a 21-24–45 scoring line in 61 appearances for the Thunderbirds and was named to the AHL Top Prospects Team.

If Dvorsky plays, it will not mark his NHL debut. The 6’1″, 201-lb center suited up twice for the Blues late last season. He wasn’t given much runway, going without a point and averaging just 9:25 of ice time per game. With Neighbours’ and Thomas’ injuries stretching St. Louis’ forward depth thin, though, it stands to reason Dvorsky should not only enter the lineup for tomorrow’s game against the Canucks but play a semi-significant role while doing so. Being able to return Nick Bjugstad or Alexandre Texier to the fourth-line roles where they started the season would not only provide the Blues with better matchup options but also allow Dvorsky his first legitimate taste of top-nine minutes in the NHL, a role they anticipate him playing for years to come.

Stars Assign Emil Hemming To OHL

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The Stars announced yesterday that they’ve reassigned winger Emil Hemming to the OHL’s Barrie Colts. He had started the season on assignment to AHL Texas but will play out the remainder of the 2025-26 season back in junior hockey.

Hemming now figures in as the top forward prospect in a depleted Dallas pool. A late first-round pick in 2024 at No. 29 overall, he spent his draft year in his native Finland, recording seven goals in 11 points in 40 games for TPS in his country’s top pro league, Liiga. The Stars quickly got him signed to his entry-level contract. They could have loaned him back to TPS for the 2024-25 season, but Hemming instead opted to make the jump to North America and signed on with Barrie, which had selected him in that year’s CHL Import Draft.

The 6’2″ sniper didn’t have quite the impact he or the Stars hoped for. His output fell short of expectations for a first-round pick in his post-draft year, tallying 18 goals and 48 points in 60 regular-season games for the Colts. There was some apparent forward progress late in the year, though – he tallied nearly a point per game for Barrie in the playoffs with an 8-7–15 scoring line in 16 appearances.

On the whole, it’s still slightly underwhelming goal-scoring from a player drafted to do just that. Dallas was hopeful he could make an impact in the pros this season and sent him to their minor-league affiliate out of camp – something he was eligible for since he was drafted out of Finland, not the OHL – but he did not record a point through five games in the AHL. He’ll now look to get some confidence back in a lower-stakes, more familiar environment as he sets his sights toward making a smoother transition to pro hockey in 2026-27.

Mammoth Sign Logan Cooley To Eight-Year Extension

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The Mammoth announced they’ve signed center Logan Cooley to an eight-year contract extension. The deal is worth $80MM for an average annual value and cap hit of $10MM. Cooley, who was a pending restricted free agent in the final year of his entry-level contract, will now remain in Utah through the 2033-34 campaign. The deal does not include signing bonus money, per PuckPedia, but has a 16-team no-trade list from 2030-31 onward. His salary breakdown per year is as follows:

2026-27: $13MM / 2027-28: $11MM / 2028-29: $11MM / 2029-30: $10MM / 2030-31: $7.8MM / 2031-32: $8.2MM / 2032-33: $8.5MM / 2033-34: $10.5MM

In doing so, the Mammoth make Cooley their new highest-paid player, at least beginning next season, and the latest in a string of players signing eight-year deals before the maximum extension length drops to seven next season. It’s a conclusion to the very relaxed, amicable negotiations described throughout between Cooley’s camp and Mammoth GM Bill Armstrong over the past few months, aside from Cooley’s high-profile rejection of an eight-year, $77MM offer.

It turns out Armstrong didn’t need to raise the bar much higher to keep his franchise cornerstone center locked in for the vast majority of his prime. While he’s done quite a lot of work over the past year and a half since the Utah franchise was born from the Coyotes’ hockey operations assets, Cooley is still a holdover from Arizona’s final years. He was the third overall pick of the 2022 draft straight out of the U.S. National Team Development Program and spent his post-draft season at the University of Minnesota, exploding for 22 goals and 60 points in 39 games with a +38 rating. He was the top playmaker in college hockey as a freshman, which, understandably, led him to be one-and-done at school and to sign his entry-level deal with the Coyotes the following offseason.

Since debuting for Arizona in 2023-24, Cooley has been consistently on the rise. He didn’t look out of place at all from the jump, checking in with a 20-goal, 44-point effort in his rookie year while serving as a middle-six center. His defensive game needed some expected cleanup, but he finished fifth in Calder Trophy voting and earned the center spot on the league’s All-Rookie Team.

Still just 21 years old, Cooley is now fully coming into his own. He demonstrated massive improvement in Utah’s first go-around in Salt Lake City last year, upping his production to 25 goals, 40 assists, and 65 points in 75 games. That came with increased success in the faceoff dot, winning 44.7% of his draws compared to just 38% in his rookie season, a workload of nearly 18 minutes per game, and improved possession metrics that saw him control 51.2% of shot attempts and 52.2% of expected goals at even strength.

Getting Cooley’s extension done now, compared to later in the season, likely saved the Mammoth millions of dollars in the long run. Cooley’s off to a torrid start in 2025-26, tied for fifth in the league with eight goals through 11 games while adding four assists for 12 points. He’s now averaging closer to 19 minutes per game, boasts a plus-five rating, and ranks second on the Mammoth in scoring behind veteran Nick Schmaltz. His continued breakout is one of the most significant factors in a Utah offense that ranks eighth in the league at 3.64 goals per game and has the team first in the Central Division.

That production comes despite Cooley not receiving “true” first-line center deployment. He’s rarely been used as the top pivot on Utah’s depth chart between Schmaltz and Clayton Keller – that honor has been bestowed upon the more defense-oriented Barrett Hayton. Cooley has instead become the centerpiece of one of the league’s most potent second lines between Dylan Guenther and JJ Peterka, but his position on the line chart does very little to alter his market value with the minutes and production he still manages.

A $10MM cap figure also checks in as a relative bargain for a player expected to consistently hover around a point per game for the life of the deal, particularly as the salary cap continues its aggressive rise. Armstrong has been quick to take advantage of increased funding from Utah ownership compared to his previous bosses in Arizona and now has the vast majority of the team’s core signed for the rest of the decade. Cooley joins Peterka ($7.7MM cap hit), Guenther ($7.14MM cap hit), Jack McBain ($4.25MM cap hit), Mikhail Sergachev ($8.5MM cap hit), and Karel Vejmelka ($4.75MM cap hit) as Mammoth players signed through 2030 or longer.

Armstrong’s work to lock in a championship-contending force in Salt Lake isn’t done yet. There’s the future of Schmaltz and Hayton, the former of whom is a pending UFA and might be well on his way to pricing himself out of an extension. Keller, the team’s captain, has three years left on his current deal. Hayton will be an arbitration-eligible RFA this summer and has no years of team control left after that.

Image courtesy of Nick Wosika-Imagn Images.

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