Nine more teams made trades Sunday and Monday to bring the total of off-season deals to 10.
One deal saw two big, tough, young forwards go from Helsinki to Frankfurt in exchange for Travis Zajac, a 29-year-old who becomes Helsinki’s second line center. Zajac is a good all-around player who never scored more than 39 points for the Inferno. But Barry Trotz is likely to give Zajac a little more ice time in Finland. One aspect of Zajac’s game that could help the Jokerit is his discipline. In three seasons, he only has 44 PIM and he is going to the most penalized team in the league.
Frankfurt gave Zajac up for 23-year-old bruisers Gareth Roberts and Kyle Clifford. Roberts is signed to a long-term contract. He has a powerful build, a vocal presence in the dressing room, and he can score the odd goal. And he’s Irish, so he’ll fight. Clifford is Canadian, and he’ll fight even more. It should be interesting when the Inferno play Schloder Division rivals Zurich, Bern and Munich, with the likes of Micki Dupont, Derek Dorsett and Dion Phaneuf, a trio that combined for a total of 22 fights last season.
In his three seasons in Geneva, defenseman Michael DelZotto was reliable, consistent and effective. He missed just 3 games in 3 years, scored 36 points every year, and could be counted on for about 100 blocked shots and 200 hits every season. And he’s only 24. Minsk GM Igor Kirunov realized that type of player doesn’t grow on trees, and he was willing to pay big to get DelZotto into a Hussar sweater. The Generals, on a downhill slide since winning the first-ever EURO championship, were able to shift into rebuild mode by trading DelZotto for three quality players: Valeri Nichushkin, Ilya Nikulin and Sergei Kostitsyn. The latter had to be very difficult for Kirunov to give up. Not only was Kostitsyn a durable, 50-point player in his three years in Minsk, but he is also a native son, a Belarus-born playing in Belarus. Nichushkin, 19, and a rising star, is Russian, as is Nikulin, a 26-year-old defenseman who never really lived up to his mammoth size and impressive athletic prowess in Minsk. Nikulin has the stamina and talent to play on Geneva’s defense pairing with all-star Dennis Wideman, but coach Joel Quenneville and the Generals’ coaches may have their work cut out for them in keeping his intensity level up high enough to stay on the top pairing. The role that Kostitsyn and Nichushkin play on the team will depend a lot on what GM Andy Rolling decides what to do with the team’s top free agent talents like Marian Gaborik, Thomas Vanek, Chris Kunitz and Patrick Marleau.
Stockholm made two deals in the last two days, obtaining veteran goalie Viktor Fasth from Paris for a 2018 third-round pick and getting Colin Greening, who has been a fixture in Copenhagen for the last three seasons for T.J. Brodie, a 24-year-old defenseman who could give some of the top Danish speed skaters a run for their money. Greening is intense and has pro skills all over the ice, but he’s prone to taking the occasional bad penalty. The acquisition of Fasth raised a few eyebrows in that it came shortly after Stockholm acquired Tomas Vokoun in a trade to back up Brayden Holtby. So either Fasth is the backup to the backup, or GM Michael Sauer has another move somewhere up his sleeve, because there are rules against playing three goalies at once.
In a draft table deal, Moscow got instantly stronger by dealing their first-round pick to Berlin in exchange for Kris Versteeg. Versteeg is capable of adding at least 50 points to his career total next season. Berlin used the pick to select Leon Draisaitl, a teen-ager who some NHL scouts say remind them of a young Jaromir Jagr. Draisaitl was born in Cologne, Germany, which is basically a hop, skip and ein sprung from Berlin.
