Welcome to a new week, folks!
We’ve reached the first full week of July, and while we had plenty of summer weather in Boston this past weekend, we actually have a respite from the 95-degree heat today, so…enjoy the outdoors.
The NHL’s Summer of Chaos continued late last week and through the weekend, with signings, trade news, arbitration, and even an offer sheet.
Everyone hates Anaheim
I say that in jest, but the Anaheim Ducks and GM Pat Verbeek seem to have a target on their collective back this summer.
The Ducks have a lot of good, young talent on the roster and appear to be trending in the right direction.
However, they had a major curveball thrown their way over the holiday weekend when the Philadelphia Flyers signed restricted free agent center Leo Carlsson to a massive five-year, $18 million AAV offer sheet.
That move was followed by rumors swirling over the weekend that another team was preparing an offer sheet for defenseman Pavel Mintyukov, who is also a restricted free agent.
While the Ducks haven’t officially matched or declined to match the Carlsson deal, they moved quickly on Sunday to extend Mintyukov and take that off of the to-do list.
They’ll likely match the Carlsson deal and keep him in Anaheim, but that’s quite a bit of targeting and/or rumored targeting in the span of a few days.
Elliotte Friedman noted that similar to the recent glut of trade requests, this marks another shift in the landscape of the NHL:
That might be the biggest change. Teams believed that, at this point in a player’s career, they had the hammer. That’s no longer the case. Now, it is: “What happened to Anaheim cannot happen to us.”
No word yet on whether or not Danny Briere and Pat Verbeek will be fighting in a barn due to the offer sheet.
Nixed Nurse move?
In Bruins-related news, there were rumblings over the weekend that the B’s and Edmonton Oilers were moving towards a deal that would send defenseman Darnell Nurse to Boston, only to have a Bruins player decline to go to Edmonton.
Oilers “insiders” (not at the link above, speaking more generally about a few Twitter accounts) insisted that the player who nixed the deal was Nikita Zadorov, but from a Bruins perspective, I’m not sure how that swap would make sense.
Zadorov has been relatively good for the Bruins since his signing, and swapping him for Nurse wouldn’t seem like a very significant upgrade.
Others suggested it was Hampus Lindholm, while still others suggested nothing like the proposed deal ever came close to happening.
So either it almost happened, it didn’t almost happen, or it might have almost maybe come close to happening, but regardless, the final result is no deal.
Got it.
Outside of hockey circles, the United States celebrated its 250th birthday over the weekend and a very exciting World Cup rolls on.
What else is on tap for today?
