Of Red Wings-related note from Detroit Hockey Now this morning:
- First, DHN’s Bob Duff reports that former Red Wing Slava Kozlov (who makes his offseason home in Spain of all places) has been hired as an assistant coach for the “Shanghai Dragons” of the KHL
“I was told they were creating a new team, a completely different project,” Kozlov told Russian website Sport-Express. “That intrigued me. There definitely won’t be the chaos we had last year.”
Kozlov took over as coach of Moscow Dynamo when Alexei Kudashov was dismissed in midseason.
Another former Red Wings player, Gerard Gallant, began last season as head coach of the Shanghai Dragons. But the team waited until late in the summer to begin assembling a roster and floundered on the ice.
“What happened last offseason can’t happen again,” Kozlov said. “Both the botched preseason and the long, unsuccessful stretches all had an impact on the final result.
“The team looked poor physically and, after the New Year, stopped competing for a playoff spot.”
Continued, with Duff noting that Martin Frk and Givani Smith are just the latest Red Wings alums to join Chinese-based teams in the KHL recently…
If you can call Shanghai a Chinese-based team. They actually play their home games in St. Petersburg, in Western Europe instead of East Asia, sharing the rink with SKA St. Petersburg.
2. Second, Max Smith discusses the weekend that was in the NHL in “The Daily,” with Smith noting that Patrick Kane has NOT yet found a new home…
After the first few days of free agency frenzy in the NHL, the vast majority of the marquee names are off the board. The league is still waiting for some of the more high profile names like Patrick Kane and Claude Giroux to finish mulling their decisions, however.
Red Wings fans should perhaps then take no news as good news, since Kane, 37, may still be considering returning to Hockeytown. That will certainly depend on how much more Steve Yzerman is able to build the roster in the coming days.
My gut feeling is that Kane may very well be waiting for the Red Wings to resolve Dylan Larkin’s situation to make a decision, given that Kane and Larkin share the same agent…
3. And, third and finally…
To that point, there still has been no news on Simon Edvinsson’s contract extension, even as around the league, players around his contract status are beginning to see offer sheets that pay them more than the NHL has ever seen before by a wide margin.
One name that will certainly effect Edvinsson’s status is the Anaheim Ducks Pavel Mintyukov.
The Ducks blueliner signed a five year contract with GM Pat Verbeek yesterday, though financial numbers have not yet been officially disclosed. Anaheim has several RFA’s to keep happy, and is currently weighing whether or not to match an offer sheet made to their stud center Leo Carlsson by the Philadelphia Flyers. It’s a spending tier a little too rich for Detroit’s blood as Kevin Allen explained in yesterday’s Daily.
Continued; Edvinsson will probably cost Detroit around $8.5 million per season to re-sign on a long-term contract…
Though the NHL’s 32 member teams have until 5 PM EDT today to decide whether to take their restricted free agents to team-elected salary arbitration.
Yesterday, 15 players elected to take their teams to salary arbitration, including Dallas Stars forward Jason Robertson.
Regardless of whether teams or players choose the salary arbitration route, the arbitration decision precludes players from being subject to offer sheets. So Robertson actually did the cap-strapped Stars a favor here.
