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Snapshots: Vrbata, Snow, Calgary

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Radim Vrbata had already announced that he would be retiring from the NHL after this season, and in an excellent piece by Craig Morgan of AZ Sports he goes into just why he made the decision. Vrbata plans on coaching his son’s hockey team in the Czech Republic, before deciding where his hockey career—whatever that entails—will take him next.

Vrbata will end his career having played 1,057 games in the NHL, scoring 623 points in the process. Though he never won a Stanley Cup, he did get to the Conference Finals with the Phoenix Coyotes in 2011-12, the same year he scored a career-high 35 goals. The seventh-round pick from 1999 proved to be an excellent offensive producer throughout his career, cracking 50 points on four occasions and scoring 30+ goals twice.

  • Garth Snow and the rest of the New York Islanders front office were apparently caught off guard by the hiring of Lou Lamoriello recently, as Larry Brooks of the New York Post reports. Snow and Islanders’ head coach Doug Weight were at the IIHF World Championship scouting in Denmark when the team hired Lamoriello to run their hockey operations, and were “kept out of the loop.” While Brooks doesn’t expand on what that means, it does add a little awkwardness as Snow is currently still listed as GM and Alternate Governor of the team, though many reports have Lamoriello with full control of the team.
  • Just as Ottawa falls into disarray again with the recent comments of Daniel Alfredsson over the desire for a new owner, Calgary gets some good news on their future. The Flames have been embroiled in a battle with the city over a prospective new arena, with both sides walking away from the table late last year. Now, city council has voted to open talks again with the team to try and get some progress towards a new home for the Flames. Several times team President Ken King has hinted that staying at their current home for much longer isn’t financially feasible, with some taking that to mean that possible relocation would happen down the road without a new arena. While this is extremely preliminary, it is at least a step in the right direction.

Karri Ramo Expected To Return To KHL’s Avangard Omsk

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Former NHL goaltender Karri Ramo has his sights set on a return, but not across the Atlantic. Instead, Ramo is expected to remain in the KHL, but sign with former team Avangard Omsk in Russia. Ramo spent this season with Jokerit, a KHL squad in his native Finland, but Russian source Championat reports that Omsk will soon announce that they have brought back the talented keeper.

Ramo, 31, is coming off of such a strong season that there was speculation that there could be interest in the NHL even though he made only 18 regular season starts for Jokerit. Ramo shared the net with U.S. Olympian Ryan Zapolski this year, but made less than half as many starts as the veteran American. However, in his limited action, Ramo was easily the best “backup” in the KHL with a .930 save percentage and 1.94 GAA. Appearances aside, those numbers were good enough for thirteenth and seventh respectively in the KHL, yet somehow just a shade worse than Zapolski. Ramo’s time came in the postseason though; he was the hot hand and made six starts to Zapolski’s five and posted an incredible .954 save percentage and 1.31 GAA.

With Omsk, Ramo will return to the team that he starred for from 2009 to 2013. A sixth-round pick of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2004, Ramo joined the Bolts as a rookie in 2006-07 and spent three years as the team’s primary backup. Ramo then left for the KHL in 2009 and quickly became on of the league’s top keepers, leading Avangard to four straight postseason appearances while posting a GAA of 2.11 or better in each season. Given his renewed value overseas, Ramo returned to the NHL in 2013 and split starts for the Calgary Flames for three seasons, but struggled to find the same success he had in Russia. In returning to Omsk, Ramo will be expected to solve the severe goaltending issues that plagued the team last season with the help of fellow new addition Igor Bobkov. Ramo will also reunite with former Calgary coach and recent Omsk hire Bob Hartley as the pair look to improve on a team that is lacking in high-end talent. A star goalie, strong defense, and experienced coaching could be all that Avangard need to make a run next season though.

Bob Hartley Hired By KHL’s Avangard Omsk

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Veteran coach Bob Hartley is headed back to the professional ranks. European hockey insider Igor Eronko reports that Hartley has been hired by Avangard Omsk of the KHL. This marks his first pro head coaching job since he was fired by the Calgary Flames back in 2016.

Hartley has had a highly successful coaching career and brings an immense amount of pedigree to Omsk. After working his way up through the QMJHL and AHL, Hartley was given his first NHL head coaching gig by the Colorado Avalanche in 1998. In his first four seasons with the Avs, Hartley guided the team to four straight conference finals and a Stanley Cup championship in 2001. When Hartley was fired mid-season by Colorado in 2002-03, he was hired almost immediately by the Atlanta Thrashers, where he coached for parts of six seasons. Hartley was out of the NHL for just one season – during which he won the NLA championship with the ZSC Lions – before he returned as the head coach of the Calgary Flames in 2012. Hartley won the 2015 Jack Adams Award as the best coach in the league for his work reinvigorating the Flames. Altogether, Hartley has a .568 winning percentage in the NHL and has reached the postseason six times.

For the past two years, Hartley has been working for the Latvian national team. He was the head coach for each of their past two World Championship entries and also consulted on their junior program. In this most recent World Championships, Latvia surprised many with a 3-1-1-2 record and seventh-place finish. Hartley’s coaching was back in the eye of the mainstream media and it is no surprise that he has landed a new job as a result. With Avangard, Hartley will take over a roster that has some good pieces, including a very solid defense, but is quite far from being a true contender. If he is able to turn the team around and improve on a twelfth-place finish last year without any further additions to the roster, it will be yet another impressive addition to his coaching resume. Don’t be surprised to see Hartley back in the conversation for an NHL job in the near future if he finds success during his KHL tenure.

Calgary Close To Naming Assistant Coaches

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  • Eric Francis of the Calgary Sun writes that the Calgary Flames are on the verge of announcing their assistant coaches that will aid new head coach Bill Peters this season after the team let assistants Paul Jerrard and Dave Cameron go when they fired Glen Gulutzan on April 17. While he didn’t have any specifics other than the announcement will come some time next week, Francis did speculate that the team might be leaning towards promoting Stockton Heat head coach Ryan Huska.

Andrew Mangiapane Expected To Resume On-Ice Training In A Month

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  • Flames winger Andrew Mangiapane is on schedule, if not slightly ahead of it, when it comes to his recovery from shoulder surgery, reports Postmedia’s Wes Gilbertson. He went under the knife in mid-March after sustaining the injury in the AHL and is roughly a month away from getting back to on-ice training.  Despite being in the minors at the time, he should have a chance to crack Calgary’s lineup on a full-time basis after holding his own in ten games with the big club this past season.

Roman Cervenka, Kevin Klein Staying In Switzerland

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Two former NHLers won’t be testing the North American market this summer. The ZSC Lions, the defending champions of the Swiss NLA, announced today that veteran defenseman Kevin Klein has signed an extension with the team and talented free agent forward Roman Cervenka has agreed to join the club. Both players are coming off strong seasons and further strengthen a championship roster that will also return top scorer Fredrik Pettersson and other former NHLers Drew Shore, Robert Nilsson, and Roman Wick next season.

Klein, 33, will return for a second season with the Lions after leaving North America last off-season with 12 NHL seasons under his belt between the Nashville Predators and New York Rangers. Known more for his conservative defensive play in the NHL, Klein impressed in his first season in the NLA with 22 points in 45 games to go along with his typical shutdown game in his own end. Klein was a force on the ice in the regular season, leading the team in penalty minutes and holding down the defensive zone on the team’s first pair. However, it was the postseason that really exemplified Klein’s ability, as he led the team with a +12 rating and trailed only Pettersson with 12 points on the team’s run to the title. Given that exclamation point on the year, it is no surprise that ZSC wanted to re-sign Klein this off-season. It is possible he would have gotten some looks in the NHL after a rebound year in Switzerland.

The rich get even richer though with the Lions’ addition of Cervenka. The 32-year-old has had a legendary hockey career overseas, even if his NHL experiment with the Calgary Flames in 2012-13 didn’t go so well. Cervenka finished his third straight season and the sixth of his career with a better than point-per-game pace in 2017-18. Although injuries limited him to just 32 regular season games with HC Fribourg-Gotteron, Cervenka nevertheless led the team with 37 points and added another team-best five points in the playoffs. In fact, Cervenka led the NLA in points per game among players with at least 25 games played. When healthy, the Czech center is a proven winner who has produced similar results in the NLA, KHL, and Czech League and on the international stage. A smart, two-way pivot who is an excellent play-maker, Cervenka likely would have drawn at least some interest among NHL teams if he had wanted to test the waters of free agency. Instead, he makes ZSC a formidable opponent in the NLA next season as they look to defend their title.

Offseason Keys: Calgary Flames

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While the playoffs are ongoing, many teams have already started their offseason planning.  What storylines lie ahead around the league?  Our Offseason Keys series continues with a look at the Calgary Flames.

After making the playoffs a year earlier, Calgary took a step back this past season.  A late-season injury to Mike Smith was costly as the team struggled down the stretch and wound up missing the playoffs as a result.  That led to a change behind the bench as Glen Gulutzan was let go with former Carolina bench boss Bill Peters takes over.  That and the departure of Brian Burke have been the big off-ice changes so far but the Flames have some key decisions to make on the ice as well.

Determine Their Backup

Eddie Lack was brought in to be the backup goaltender for Smith but that didn’t last too long.  He struggled mightily at the beginning of the year and wound up being dealt to New Jersey in a swap of waived-and-buried veteran players.  That resulted in a pair of youngsters getting chances and suffice it to say, the results were mixed.

David Rittich got off to a strong start, posting a .938 SV% in his first six starts.  However, he failed to come even close to maintaining that mark the rest of the way, checking in with a .889 mark in his final 14 appearances which is well below the NHL average.  Jon Gillies saw some action when Smith went down and he was consistently inconsistent and didn’t stake a claim to a full-time spot either.

Both players are set to become restricted free agents this summer and if nothing else, they should receive qualifying offers.  However, is it a prudent move to leave the number two spot open for one of them?  Or does it make more sense to add a veteran backup in a move similar to what Lack was supposed to provide this past season?  While a backup goaltender doesn’t seem like a key need most of the time, that player can make a big difference, a lesson that Calgary learned the hard way in 2017-18.

Find A Top Line RW

This one has been on their radar for a while.  Three years ago, Michael Frolik was brought in and while he has shown an offensive touch at times, he’s too inconsistent to hold down a spot alongside Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan.  The following summer, Troy Brouwer was brought in to fill that spot.  Two years later, that $4.5MM per year contract looks like somewhat of an albatross after he scored just six times this past season.

Micheal Ferland saw some time to start the season and to his credit, he held his own relatively well despite being more of a physical energy player.  The team brought in Jaromir Jagr with the hopes that he could keep up and that simply didn’t happen; he wound up being waived and loaned back to the Czech Republic.  Ferland saw a lot of time there in the second half of the year but that’s still not his ideal spot to be.

Finding a legitimate scoring threat to play on that top unit would go a long way towards helping an offense that ranked 26th overall in the NHL in 2017-18.  Not only would it make that top line that much more dangerous but it would also allow their other wingers to play in roles that are better suited for them.

Decision On Bennett

Sam Bennett’s third full NHL season largely resembled that of his sophomore campaign which has led to plenty of questions about his long-term upside.  The fourth overall pick in 2014 has shown flashes that he can still become an impact player but at other times, he has struggled considerably.  A change of position from center to the wing didn’t do much to change his fortunes either.

Last summer, the call Calgary needed to make was whether to give him a bridge contract or take a gamble and lock him up long-term.  They went with the short-term deal, two years with a $1.95MM cap hit and that certainly looks like the right choice at this time after he put up his second straight 26 point campaign.

This offseason, the decision that needs to be made is whether or not they still believe he is part of their long-term future.  If not, the time might be right to move him, even though his value isn’t exactly at its peak.  If there’s a team that believes a change of scenery is all he needs to get on track, the Flames should still be able to leverage a quality asset in return.  If they opt to hold onto him, one more year like the one he just had will only weaken his value.  On the flip side, with Peters behind the bench and a new system in place, GM Brad Treliving has to at least consider the possibility that those changes might be enough to get Bennett going in Calgary.  It’s a bit of a risky decision to make either way but it’s a call that they will have to make sooner than later.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

Rangers Must Continue To Upgrade Their Defense

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The New York Rangers still have to hire a coach, but the team’s top goal is to continue to improve its blueline this offseason. Just a year ago, the Rangers invested heavily into a veteran defense that was expected to be among the best in the league. The team went out and signed highly coveted free agent Kevin Shattenkirk and re-signed Brendan Smith to go with captain Ryan McDonagh and Marc Staal and a rising Brady Skjei.

Instead the defense struggled mightily as they were ranked fourth in goals against, allowing 3.21 goals per game during the 2017-18 season. Now with McDonagh gone and the team in a rebuild, the Rangers must make more changes to improve their struggling blueline.

The Athletic’s Shayna Goldman (subscription required) writes that a few pieces are certain. A healthy Shattenkirk should boost the team’s defense after the team shut him down in the middle of the year with a torn meniscus. Throw in a much improved year for Staal and the Rangers have a couple of solid pieces to aid them. The team still has high hopes for Skjei, despite his second-year struggles, but Smith is a complete unknown as it will be up to him to get into game shape and prove he was worth the four-year, $17.4MM deal he signed last offseason. The team did like the way rookie Neal Pionk played in his 28-game trial at the end of the year. Even defenseman Anthony DeAngelo showed improvement at the end of the year as well. The team also added a number of new young d-men at the trade deadline that aren’t too far off, including Ryan Lindgren, Libor Hajek and Yegor Rykov.

Regardless, the team could use a boost from an experienced young defenseman that can help stabilize last year’s crew or at the very least, more young talent that will be ready within a year. The New York Post’s Larry Brooks writes that the team should consider offering up either Kevin Hayes or Mike Zibanejad in exchange for defensive help, assuming the player they get back is a current or future top-four defenseman. While he believes that Dougie Hamilton would be the perfect trade target, he doubts the Calgary Flames would move him. However, Calgary is loaded with defensive prospects that are stuck behind their veteran defense, suggesting the Rangers go after prospect Adam Fox, who is a top defenseman at Harvard University, and who was the former partner of Lindgren. Trading one of those young veterans could work as centermen are in high demand right now with few available on the free agent market and with the Rangers putting much of their hopes on both of last year’s first-round picks in Lias Andersson and Filip Chytil at center next season.

No matter what, the team will have to make some changes if they hope to improve on their disappointing 2017-18 season.

Daniel Pribyl Signs In Czech Republic

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After missing all of last season with a torn ACL, Calgary Flames forward Daniel Pribyl is heading home. He has signed a contract with Prague in the Czech Republic to play next season, leaving North America after just 33 games at the AHL level. Pribyl was set to become a restricted free agent this summer, after his two-year entry-level contract expired.

Pribyl was originally drafted by the Montreal Canadiens in 2011, but signed with the Flames in the spring of 2016 after an impressive run in the Czech league. The big-bodied center was expected to compete for a job on the NHL squad eventually, even if his high point totals from Europe were unlikely to be matched in North America. Instead, he recorded 15 points in 33 games for the Stockton Heat and then suffered the knee injury in training camp last September. For a player who looked like he might have a bright future here, his story is an unfortunate series of events.

The Flames can retain his negotiating rights for now by extending a qualifying offer but unlike players returning to the KHL will not hold them in perpetuity. Instead, this is likely the last we see of Pribyl in a Flames (or Heat) uniform. The team can now focus on their other restricted free agents, of which they have several.

Overseas Notes: Cameron, Lewis, Huska

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Dave Cameron did not stay unemployed for very long, though his new position is far from where he has made his living for the last thirty-odd years. The Erste Bank Liga (EBEL), a lower-tier European league based mostly in Austria, has announced that Cameron has been named the new head coach of the Vienna Capitals, the league’s reigning regular season champions. Cameron had been working as an assistant coach for the Calgary Flames for the past two seasons, but was relieved last month alongside head coach Glen Gulutzan. Prior to that position, he has served as the head coach for the Ottawa Senators after working his way up from long-time assistant. Even before that, Cameron was showing the breadth of his hockey mind as both the head coach and GM of several OHL franchises. Yet, this new job is his first outside of North America and brings with it the challenges of a brand new market and caliber of player. However, Cameron is an experienced coach and should find his way in no time at all in Vienna.

  • Another coach has not been so lucky. Dave Lewis, most well known for a long stint as assistant and head coach of the Detroit Red Wings from the late 80’s through the mid-2000’s, has lost his job with the Belarus national program, per insider Igor Eronko. Lewis, who also had a short-lived stint as Boston Bruins head coach and brief stops as an assistant with the Los Angeles Kings and Carolina Hurricanes, has been working for Belarus in various roles since 2014. He had guided four IIHF World Championship teams, an Olympic qualifying bid, and the team’s World Juniors appearance this season. However, just three games into the ongoing Worlds, national officials have clearly decided that they have had enough with the lack of success out of their long-time coach. Lewis has struggled to find results as a head coach over the years and the next step for the 64-year-old is a mystery.
  • Although Adam Huska likely has two years left at the University of Connecticut, HK Sochi of the KHL may have made a shrewd move in acquiring the KHL rights to the Slovak goaltender today. The team reported this morning that Huska’s rights had been transferred to Sochi from Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in exchange for forward Dmitri Lugin. Huska was a seventh-round pick of the New York Rangers in 2015, but given the team’s depth in goalie prospects – Alexandar Georgiev, Brandon Halverson, and mostly Igor Shestyorkin – it’s quite possible that Huska could choose to return home to Europe, in which case Sochi will gain a talented, young netminder. Huska posted a .912 save percentage and 2.59 GAA in 27 starts last year and should only continue to thrive in net for UConn before he makes his decision on turning pro.

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