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Chris Kreider waives no-trade clause to accept deal from the Rangers to the Ducks, AP source says

Chris Kreider waives no-trade clause to accept deal from the Rangers to the Ducks, AP source says

Associated Press21 hours ago

New York Rangers' Chris Kreider celebrates after scoring a goal during the second period of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals against the Tampa Bay Lightning, in the NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoffs, May 22, 2015, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, file) Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year]
Chris Kreider has agreed to move his no-trade clause to accept a trade from the New York Rangers to the Anaheim Ducks, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Thursday because the deal had not been finalized.
The trade is expected to be completed later Thursday.
Kreider, 34, is third on the franchise goal-scoring list with 326 after spending his first 13 NHL seasons with the Rangers. He has two years left on his contract at an annual salary cap hit of $6.5 million.
Moving on from Kreider is general manager Chris Drury's first offseason change to a roster that underachieved and missed the playoffs.
The New York Post was first to report Kreider accepting the move.
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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

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Canucks notebook: Abbotsford coach Manny Malhotra's success, winger Jonathan Lekkerimäki's playoff struggles
Canucks notebook: Abbotsford coach Manny Malhotra's success, winger Jonathan Lekkerimäki's playoff struggles

New York Times

time24 minutes ago

  • New York Times

Canucks notebook: Abbotsford coach Manny Malhotra's success, winger Jonathan Lekkerimäki's playoff struggles

It's a notable silver lining in what's been a trying, difficult year for the Vancouver Canucks franchise. On Friday night, the Abbotsford Canucks, Vancouver's American League affiliate and top minor league club, will face a buzzsaw Charlotte Checkers in the franchise's first-ever appearance in the Calder Cup Finals. Advertisement The Checkers, who advanced to the finals in just 10 total games, have home ice advantage in the series and are narrowly favoured to win in the outright markets. To do it, though, they'll have to defeat an overachieving, hard-working, deep and well-coached Abbotsford that's been building toward this moment patiently and with discipline since relocating from Utica, N.Y., to the Fraser Valley in the spring of 2021. How did Abbotsford get here? How did Manny Malhotra pull this off in his first season as a professional head coach? And what comes next for some of the best young players on this team? Let's open the notebook and set up the Calder Cup Finals. Given the Vancouver market's obsession with NHL-level hockey, the on-ice success the club has manufactured, and a significant change in the organization's approach to its top farm team, Abbotsford, has largely flown under the radar. In truth, it's been somewhat fascinating to watch. When the club operated in Utica, in partnership with president Robert Esche, the Utica Comets developed a reputation for being a scrappy but underfunded outfit with diehard fan support in the Mohawk Valley. Utica enjoyed some intermittent on-ice success, like when Travis Green and Jacob Markstrom led the club to the Calder Cup Finals in 2015, but the roster was often pieced together with tryout players and the like. The American League, in contrast with the NHL, isn't capped. Come playoff time, Utica could bump into a Toronto Marlies squad, where the Comets' combined roster salaries totalled a sum less than what the Marlies were icing on their first power-play unit. When Utica first relocated to the Fraser Valley at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic-shortened 2021 season, things suddenly changed. Challenged with effectively building an American League team from scratch, with little in the way of in-house prospect depth to speak of, general manager Ryan Johnson and the organization signed nearly a dozen American League veterans. Advertisement The goal was to make a splash in a new marketplace, one that had a difficult history with American League hockey. The approach of building an expensive, veteran-laden roster, however, was also driven by necessity. The club didn't have enough developmental prospects to properly staff a competitive roster. Over the past few years, as Abbotsford has churned through coaches and knocked on the door as a consistent American League playoff team, that's begun to change. And it's in part because of the team's deliberate approach to sign high-scoring, undrafted Western Hockey League players, including Abbotsford captain Chase Wouters, and pest forward Tristen Nielsen (who has since signed an NHL-level standard player contract). With a push to acquire free agents out of Europe, the collegiate ranks and the CHL, Abbotsford has slowly but surely developed a nucleus of younger, cost-controlled players who have formed this team and pushed its way to the finals. More than any other factor driving this run, a group of mid-20s NHL prospects highlighted by Arshdeep Bains, Linus Karlsson, Max Sasson and Artūrs Šilovs, all of whom have played more than 100 games with Abbotsford over the past few years, have bound together and, in the organization's view, decided to pursue this long run in business-like fashion. Culturally, there's a real sense of honesty and self-awareness at the core of how this team has forged its identity. An understanding that everyone in the American League's goal is to work their way to the bigger stage. To get out. Explicitly, that's the big-picture goal. The point of all this is to learn and improve. To get better, to graduate and ultimately to leave. There's a notion that if you're still here in four or five years, and this standard applies to everybody in the organization, from coaches to equipment staff to the players themselves, then the organization hasn't succeeded. Advertisement Somewhere throughout this season, the honest, business-like mentality has congealed into something resilient. A deep team focused on the day-to-day routine and the workmanlike rhythms of trying to graduate from the American Hockey League, the pressure of playing an elimination game or facing a third-period deficit has appeared to melt away. 'Forget the result (of this finals),' Johnson told The Athletic this week, when asked if he has any expectations for his group as they prepare to play the biggest games in Abbotsford's history. 'I expect this team to leave it all out there. And they have throughout this entire run. … 'Honestly, I wouldn't say I have a ton of expectations, though. It's just about staying the course and doing what we've talked about from day one of the regular season. … If it's not enough, it's not enough, but at the end of the day, what this group has decided to do is to go for it. And I know they will.' Playoff Diaries: Western Conference Finals Game 6 🎥 Abbotsford advances to the Calder Cup Finals for the first time in franchise history! — X – Abbotsford Canucks (@abbycanucks) June 10, 2025 When an American League team succeeds at this level, it tends to garner some attention from the industry at large. Calder Cup playoff success results in players being more marketable as free agents and in the departure of coaches. That's especially true when the coaches in question are highly regarded, thoughtful and charismatic, the way first-year bench boss Malhotra has proven to be during stints as an assistant coach in Vancouver and Toronto, and over his first full year as a head coach in the Fraser Valley. It hasn't always been a smooth process. A coach serves as something of a metronome for a hockey team, setting schedules, dealing with travel planning and doing an awful lot of work beyond the day-to-day grind of preparing a team. Until you've been through a full cycle, there are a million little things that you can't possibly know until you've experienced them. It's little details like not scheduling special teams meetings and practices for early in the week, because in the American League, an injury at the NHL level in a Thursday night game might, and probably will, alter your gameplan that weekend when your best player is called up to dress for the big club as an injury replacement. Advertisement Even beyond finding his voice and vision as a head coach, Malhotra had to undergo a crash course in all of that this season. And the results have been tremendous. In addition to the success of his approach on the ice, Malhotra's first season in Abbotsford has been accompanied by a significant appreciation for the flow and energy level of his practices. It's a factor that the club has come to prize internally, but has also been noted by various agents representing players at the AHL level. 'Manny's commitment to the process and consistency, his practice delivery and attention to detail day to day, it isn't just about winning hockey games,' said Johnson. 'It's about getting down to our process. It's about professionalism and the quality of our players as teammates. 'Manny felt if he got that down, then the rest would follow. And this run is a result of those things.' In the process, Malhotra, who was a finalist to succeed Rick Tocchet before the Canucks opted to hire Adam Foote, has put himself squarely on the map as a top candidate in the next NHL head-coaching hiring cycle. And maybe even sooner. There are only nine left-handed defenseman under six feet who appeared in over 50 NHL games this past season. And many of the shorter, left-handed defenders in the NHL, like Quinn Hughes, Lane Hutson and Shayne Gostisbehere, are high-scoring offensive defenders. Mainstays on the power play. They're one-man breakout machines and attacking engines from the back end, generally speaking. There are a few exceptions; players like Dmitry Orlov, Matt Grzelcyk and Samuel Girard are the rare breed of defensive-minded, shorter left-handed defenders. They're the exceptions that prove the rule, however. A 2022 seventh-round draft pick, first-year professional defender Kirill Kudryavtsev has already overcome long odds to make it this far. He's enjoyed a strong first professional season, even earning a call-up to the NHL down the stretch. Advertisement What Kudryavtsev has done for Abbotsford in the playoffs, however, is altogether different. He's been Abbotsford's best two-way defender, helping the Canucks outscore their opponents by a lopsided margin in his five-on-five minutes on their run through the Western Conference. It's the sort of breakout performance that can change how a player is perceived by their organization and by the wider industry. Rare profile or not, there's something real there in Kudryavtsev. Throughout the playoffs, Abbotsford's best players have been fringe NHL-level players in their mid-20s, like Sasson, Bains and Victor Mancini. Vancouver's younger, higher pedigree prospects, aside from Kudryavtsev, have mostly been peripheral to Abbotsford's playoff success. In the case of top blue-line prospect Tom Willander, his absence has been business-related. He's missed out on this playoff run due to a protracted contractual standoff following his graduation from Boston University. Aatu Räty has been limited by injury, appearing in just six of Abbotsford's 18 playoff games. Meanwhile, promising young forward Jonathan Lekkerimäki, who captured the imagination of Canucks fans with his 24-game run at the NHL-level this season, has been a regular healthy scratch as the club approaches the finals. He's struggled to manufacture offence or shots at the same auspicious rate he managed during the regular season. A rocket from Lekker! 🚀 Jonathan Lekkerimäki's first NHL goal is the first RE/MAX Canada Move of the Week! — Vancouver Canucks (@Canucks) November 18, 2024 Despite Lekkerimäki's playoff struggles, his first professional season in North America should be regarded as a mostly unqualified success. As a 20-year-old player, he scored at the rate you'd hope to see from a future top-six forward at the NHL level and didn't look out of place in the NHL when he got a look there. Advertisement That he hasn't been at his best in the Calder Cup playoffs, truthfully, hints at the ground that Lekkerimäki still has to develop physically enough to be an impactful NHL-level goal scorer. While he is a strong skater, he's not NHL-level fast at this stage of his career. There's no technical reason that he can't be, in time, but he'll need to build considerable, functional core strength to improve his power and top speed as a skater. Lekkerimäki is an undersized player and doesn't yet have the strength to cut back or protect the puck along the wall the way most undersized forwards — the Canucks' Conor Garland and Nils Höglander are potent examples of this — need to to succeed in the NHL. For whatever reason, Lekkerimäki has hit a wall in the Calder Cup playoffs. There are lessons for him and the Canucks in that, but it shouldn't be viewed as a concern that would adjust how we rate Lekkerimäki and his progress. This is a gifted player with a couple of NHL-ready traits, including his perimeter shooting skill, and his nuance and skill on the flank with the man advantage, and a lot of work is needed to enhance his physical development if he hopes to succeed during the toughest time of year in the American League. And eventually as a full-time top-six contributor at the NHL level.

Flyers' Matvei Michkov Joined By 2 Rivals on NHL All-Rookie Team
Flyers' Matvei Michkov Joined By 2 Rivals on NHL All-Rookie Team

Yahoo

time28 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Flyers' Matvei Michkov Joined By 2 Rivals on NHL All-Rookie Team

One voter didn't quite like Matvei Michkov as much as everyone else. (Photo: Kyle Ross, Imagn Images) Star Philadelphia Flyers rookie Matvei Michkov was a near-unanimous admission to the 2025 NHL All-Rookie Team Thursday, and he was joined on the squad by two of his biggest rivals. Michkov, 20, was one of five players named to the NHL All-Rookie Team. Montreal Canadiens defenseman Lane Hutson, Calgary Flames goalie Dustin Wolf, and San Jose Sharks forward Macklin Celebrini were each unanimous selections after collecting 187 points in the voting process. Advertisement Michkov, with his 186 points, was exactly one point off a unanimous selection. Seems silly, doesn't it? In addition to Hutson, who is typically the subject of online debate amongst Flyers and Canadiens fans, Michkov was joined by another Flyers villain in Cutter Gauthier, who notoriously spurned the team for months leading up to his shocking trade to the Anaheim Ducks. Gauthier, 21, collected the third-most points in the voting process behind Michkov and Celebrini, pulling in 79 points. Trailing him were names like Will Smith (60), Zack Bolduc (20), and Logan Stankoven (16). How Did Matvei Michkov Fare in Calder Trophy Voting? How Did Matvei Michkov Fare in Calder Trophy Voting? Although it was already known Advertisement Philadelphia Flyers star Matvei Michkov wouldn't be a finalist for the 2025 Calder Trophy, the voting process painted a much different picture. Michkov wasn't the only Flyers rookie to represent the organization, either. Rookie defenseman Emil Andrae earned some looks from voters, finishing with seven points in the voting process. Andrae finished fifth amongst defensemen in voting, trailing Albert Johansson, Drew Helleson, and All-Rookie team members Hutson and Denton Mateychuk. Andrae, 23, finished his first full-ish season in the NHL with a goal, six assists, and seven points in 42 games while averaging 17:21 of ice time. As for Michkov, the 20-year-old former No. 7 overall pick led all NHL rookies in goals with 26 and finished with 63 points in 80 games. Advertisement Notably, Michkov racked up three overtime-winners before his 20th birthday on Dec. 9, making him one of four teenagers in NHL history to have at least three. The others are Sidney Crosby, Ilya Kovalchuk, and Rick Nash. It's fair to say that this is a pretty good group to be a part of. Michkov is the first Flyers rookie to be named to the NHL All-Rookie team since Simon Gagne in 2000, with Mikael Renberg (1994) and Eric Lindros (1993) preceding him. For more Flyers news and up-to-date coverage, visit The Hockey News and like our Facebook page. Follow us on 𝕏: @ByJonBailey, @TheHockeyNews

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