Siegenthaler recorded nine points in 64 games and averaged 15:44 per contest during the 2019-20 campaign. The Swiss native was one of Washington's most reliable defensive defensemen last season, as his 2.13 expected goals against per 60 minutes was the lowest among Caps blue-liners to log at least 100 minutes at five-on-five, according to Natural Stat Trick.
The 23-year-old projects to be a key cog on Washington's third pairing with Michal Kempny out six-to-eight months due to an Achilles injury, despite some offseason additions to the back end.
LD
RD
Brenden Dillon
John Carlson
Dmitry Orlov
Justin Schultz
Jonas Siegenthaler
Nick Jensen
Trevor van Riemsdyk
Siegenthaler, who stands at 6-foot-3 and 206 pounds, was the Capitals' second-round pick in 2015.
The Seattle Kraken announced seven new hirings Wednesday, most prominently adding longtime NHL forward Gary Roberts as their sports science and performance consultant.
"Roberts will work to provide the Kraken training center and team infrastructure with the proper equipment and systems in place to enable Kraken players to perform at their highest potential," the club said in a statement.
Roberts, 56, became a personal trainer after retiring from the NHL in 2009. His success in the field led him to create the Gary Roberts High Performance Centre in Toronto, where he currently works with several NHL players including Connor McDavid and Steven Stamkos.
The hiring marks Roberts' second post-playing role with an NHL club; he served as the Dallas Stars' player development consultant in 2010-11.
Roberts and Kraken general manager Ron Francis were teammates during their playing careers with both the Carolina Hurricanes (1998-2000) and the Toronto Maple Leafs (2003-04).
Roberts amassed 438 goals and 910 points over 1,224 career contests and captured the Stanley Cup with the Calgary Flames in 1989.
Edmonton Oilers head coach Dave Tippett believes his club will get an improved version of Jesse Puljujarvi when the Swedish-born Finnish forward rejoins the club next season.
"You watch him play now and he's a different player," Tippett said, according to NHL.com's Ryan Frankson. "He's a dominant player in the Finnish league right now.
"His English is good and he's anxious to come over and prove he can be a good player in the best league in the world ... I think we'll get a much better player coming in here this time."
Puljujarvi tallied 24 goals and 53 points over 56 games for Karpat of the Finnish Elite League in 2019-20 to rank fourth in league scoring.
The Oilers signed the 6-foot-4 winger to a two-year, $2.35-million deal earlier this month. He's been loaned to Karpat for the beginning of the 2020-21 campaign but will return to North America once the NHL season starts.
Puljujarvi has struggled to carve out a permanent role at the NHL level since being selected fourth overall by Edmonton at the 2016 draft. He recorded 17 goals and 37 points over 139 contests with the Oilers before choosing to return to Finland prior to last season after the team failed to meet his trade request.
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Free agency in October. Weird. Such is life in 2020, and it's only fitting that an offseason taking place during what is usually the start of the regular season brings some wild and unexpected activity.
With the dust settling following a flurry of signings and trades, theScoreBet released our Stanley Cup odds for the 2020-21 season, and we dive into the teams you need to be buying and selling at their current price.
Team
Odds
Colorado Avalanche
+450
Tampa Bay Lightning
+800
Vegas Golden Knights
+900
Boston Bruins
+1100
Dallas Stars
+1600
Philadelphia Flyers
+1600
Carolina Hurricanes
+1800
New York Islanders
+1800
St. Louis Blues
+1800
Washington Capitals
+1800
Pittsburgh Penguins
+2200
Toronto Maple Leafs
+2200
Vancouver Canucks
+2200
Edmonton Oilers
+2800
Calgary Flames
+3000
Nashville Predators
+3000
Florida Panthers
+3500
New York Rangers
+3500
Columbus Blue Jackets
+3800
San Jose Sharks
+4000
Winnipeg Jets
+4000
Montreal Canadiens
+4500
Buffalo Sabres
+5000
Anaheim Ducks
+6000
Chicago Blackhawks
+6000
Minnesota Wild
+6000
Arizona Coyotes
+6500
Los Angeles Kings
+7000
New Jersey Devils
+8500
Ottawa Senators
+12500
Detroit Red Wings
+15000
Buy
Toronto Maple Leafs (+2200)
While the Leafs didn’t necessarily get better in the offseason, they drastically changed the culture of the team. Wayne Simmonds, Zach Bogosian, and Joe Thornton's best days are well behind them, but they each add an element of tenacity and experience desperately needed in Toronto. The bottom six is a cause for concern - it's a slow group that will be exposed against good teams - with the trades of Andreas Johnsson and Kasperi Kapanen hurting the Leafs' depth, but Kyle Dubas did well to improve the back end.
T.J. Brodie and Bogosian are clear stylistic upgrades over Tyson Barrie and Cody Ceci, fitting well into the top six. If the Leafs can get enough production up front from their complementary pieces - admittedly a big if - the rest is in place for this team to be a difficult one to play against. Oddsmakers have finally softened a bit on Toronto, so don't wait much longer to get in.
Montreal Canadiens (+4500)
There was a lot of pressure on general manager Marc Bergevin heading into the offseason to build on a strong playoff performance and the emergence of young stars Nick Suzuki and Jesperi Kotkaniemi. He delivered. Josh Anderson and Tyler Toffoli add much-needed scoring to the top six, the arrivals of Joel Edmundson and Alex Romanov solidify a deep blue line, while the acquisition of Jake Allen provides the Canadiens with a true backup goalie for the first time in years, lightening the burden on Carey Price.
The Habs have great depth throughout the roster, with a healthy blend of size and skill. With the continued progression of Suzuki and Kotkaniemi, the Canadiens can make some real noise this season in a wide-open Eastern Conference. This price should be in the 25-1 to 30-1 range.
Sell
Colorado Avalanche (+450)
Don't get me wrong, the Avalanche had a better offseason than just about anyone, and far and away the best of any true Cup contender. Joe Sakic might not have many more of his phone calls answered after absolutely fleecing the Islanders for defenseman Devon Toews. Brandon Saad was another smart acquisition, as Colorado added excellent value to what was arguably already the best roster in the NHL.
So why sell on the Avalanche? Because +450 is an egregious price in the futures market. It's an especially egregious price in a league of parity and arguably the toughest trophy to win in professional sports. Even if the Avalanche rip through the regular season and finish atop the Western Conference, these are the sort of odds you can get at the start of the playoffs. Exercise patience here.
New York Islanders (+1800)
Speaking of getting fleeced, losing Toews for virtually nothing was the cherry on top of a miserable offseason for the Islanders, just weeks after coming so close to reaching the Stanley Cup Final. Salary cap issues were the driving force, but Toews’ departure will be a crippling blow on the blue line. Losing Thomas Greiss will be made more manageable by the arrival of Ilya Sorokin, but this team did nothing to improve and that's a big concern. At just +1800, I'm staying far, far away.
Vancouver Canucks (+2200)
It’s been a head-scratching offseason for general manager Jim Benning. The biggest blow was the departure of Jacob Markstrom, who was playing at a Vezina level for this team last season. It vaults Thatcher Demko into a full-time role, with Braden Holtby and his declining skills brought in to share duties.
Chris Tanev and Troy Stecher signing elsewhere is a blow to the Canucks' already worrisome depth, but the most puzzling decision was not bringing back Toffoli, who signed an incredibly reasonable and affordable deal in Montreal. Sure, acquiring Nate Scmidt was one of the best trades of the offseason, but it’s not enough to erase the irreversible damage done before that. This is a team primed for a decline.
Alex Moretto is a sports betting writer for theScore. A journalism graduate from Guelph-Humber University, he has worked in sports media for over a decade. He will bet on anything from the Super Bowl to amateur soccer, is too impatient for futures, and will never trust a kicker. Find him on Twitter @alexjmoretto.
“Ilya decided to step off a little bit from an already agreed number to help the team fit under the cap,” Dan Milstein told Sportsnet's Luke Fox on Tuesday night. “For Ilya, it was less about the money, but more about the role in the organization. He wishes to win the Stanley Cup. It's been a lifelong dream.”
The Maple Leafs and Mikheyev initially agreed to a cap hit exceeding the $1.645 million that accompanied the two-year contract the two sides announced Tuesday, according to Milstein.
However, the club then called the agent back - while he was on the phone with Mikheyev outlining the original deal - and asked if he'd be willing to take a slight decrease in pay to accommodate Toronto's cap situation.
The 26-year-old forward signed his new pact fewer than 24 hours before he was scheduled to have a salary arbitration hearing. He reportedly filed for a one-year contract at $2.7 million, while the team offered two years at $1 million.
Mikheyev became a fan favorite in his rookie campaign while posting eight goals and 15 assists over 39 games in 2019-20. He returned for the playoffs in August after his regular season came to an early end when his wrist was cut by a skate in December.
The Russian winger spent four years with the KHL's Avangard Omsk - his hometown squad - and signed a one-year, $925,000 deal with the Maple Leafs in May 2019.
Toronto's projected cap hit for 2020-21 is now $81,675,200, according to CapFriendly. The cap ceiling will be $81.5 million next season. Defenseman Travis Dermott is the lone remaining restricted free agent on the club's NHL roster.
Willie O'Ree's surname, the four letters that changed hockey for the better when they appeared on an NHL lineup card in 1958, derives from that of the American military officer who enslaved his great-great-grandfather. The officer was Peter Horry, pronounced unlike what you'd expect. He fought the British in the Revolutionary War, and in recognition of his service, he was given a Black man to own. The man was Paris O'Ree, as the name was later stylized, whose courage unlocked a future for his descendants.
Willie O'Ree isn't sure how Paris secured his freedom, but archival records he's read relate the enormity of what the man accomplished. Along with some family and at tremendous risk, Paris is believed to have escaped South Carolina, where Horry lived, late in the 18th century, becoming a farmer and father upon settling north of the border. He came to own a couple hundred acres in New Brunswick, Willie's future home province. Paris' son had a son who had a son who had a son, the trailblazing winger who's proud to share his ancestor's spirit.
A name is weighted with history, and Paris O'Ree rewrote his family's. Anti-racism protests gripped his great-great-grandson's sport this year, as they have North American society at large. Where Paris sought liberty, NHL players want their game to be inclusive and welcoming, full stop. They want to eliminate any remnant of the barriers and the hate that Willie O'Ree - the first Black man to play in the NHL - conquered when he debuted with the Boston Bruins.
Paris and his family "set goals for themselves, I guess the way I did," O'Ree said in a phone interview this week. "They wanted to make a better life for themselves. (Despite) the hardships and things they had to go through, they just made things happen."
Mike Stobe / NHL / Getty Images
Together with author Michael McKinley, O'Ree has written a new memoir, "Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL's First Black Player." The book, released in hardcover Tuesday, recounts his ascent to hockey history: how he twice dressed for the Bruins in 1957-58, tallied 14 points in 43 games for Boston in 1960-61 - no small feat in the Original Six era when NHL roster spots were in short supply - and skated in a further 785 games in the minor-pro Western Hockey League, from which he retired in 1974 as a top-20 career scorer. As it happens, 1974 was the year the Washington Capitals drafted and signed Mike Marson, the first Black player to follow O'Ree to the NHL.
O'Ree turned 85 last week, and his presence in the game remains cherished. He was elected as a builder to the Hall of Fame in 2018, and became that same year the namesake of the NHL's Willie O'Ree Community Hero Award, presented annually to a person who harnesses hockey to positively impact his or her part of the world. O'Ree lives near San Diego, his longtime WHL home, but he's a product of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was there as a child that he listened by radio to Hockey Night in Canada. He idolized Maurice Richard, and Foster Hewitt's nasal, rousing commentary provided the soundtrack to his Saturday nights.
Without a TV at home, O'Ree never watched Richard play. Only later did he think about the upside of this constraint: how seeing no Black men on the ice might have snuffed his childhood ambition, and how instead he was empowered to visualize a sport and league in which he belonged.
O'Ree (right) skates for the Bruins in 1961. Bruce Bennett / Getty Images
O'Ree's first hockey mentor was his oldest brother, Richard (nicknamed "Coot"), a regional light-heavyweight boxing champion 17 years his senior whose tutelage helped fine-tune O'Ree's best skills: the blazing speed, the stickhandling honed on choppy pond ice, the will to absorb hard hits and respond in kind. Booted off his high school team for hurting the coach's son with a clean open-ice check, O'Ree charted his own course through Fredericton's youth ranks to Quebec's top junior league. There, his coach - the former NHL star Phil Watson - endorsed O'Ree's towering potential, telling him he had the talent to become hockey's Jackie Robinson.
Emulating Robinson's breakthrough on the diamond required O'Ree to keep a troublesome secret: He was blind in one eye, the consequence of a deflected slapshot that had smashed his right retina in junior.
O'Ree told a single confidant, his older sister Betty, about the injury. To everyone else, he looked like the same fleet left-winger with scoring touch, and the Bruins, whose vetting process didn't include a sight exam, soon promoted him to the NHL. Squeezed out of the 132-player league after 1961, O'Ree went on to excel for 13 seasons in the WHL, where the Los Angeles Blades cleared a positional glut by shifting him to the right wing. The switch enabled his good eye to process more of the ice, powering him to five 30-goal seasons.
"It was a big move for me," O'Ree said.
Mark Blinch / NHL / Getty Images
The 13th and youngest child of one of two Black families in Fredericton, O'Ree writes in his memoir that he was never bullied for the color of his skin growing up. In adulthood, racism tailed him across the continent. O'Ree rode a segregated bus to attend a pro baseball training camp - he was a good middle infielder, too - in Georgia in 1956. Junior hockey fans in Chicoutimi, Quebec, chanted racial obscenities at him. Minor-league fans in Virginia hurled a black cat over the glass during one of his shifts. During an NHL road game in 1961, O'Ree writes, Chicago forward Eric Nesterenko called him the N-word, shattered his front teeth with a butt-end to the mouth, and repeated the slur. (Nesterenko has said he doesn't remember the oft-told incident.)
In 1965, O'Ree and a Blades teammate drove through the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the aftermath of the area's six-day uprising against racial discrimination. He recalls breathing in the air and surveying burned-out buildings, processing the fury and sorrow that compelled Watts' Black residents to take to the streets.
Rage and the desire for justice - for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black victims of U.S. police violence - moved millions of Americans to protest this spring and summer. In the absence of justice, O'Ree writes in his reflection on Watts, anger is an understandable response.
"People of color have always been targeted, way back since slavery," O'Ree said. "I'm all for protesting in a nonviolent way, and the marching to let people know that people's lives matter. They really do. I'm just hoping, and I keep my fingers crossed, that things are going to get better."
Dave Sandford / NHL / Getty Images
In hockey, Black players who followed O'Ree to the peak of the profession have taken it upon themselves to lobby for change. At the start of the NHL's bubbled postseason, Minnesota Wild defenseman Matt Dumba spoke at center ice on behalf of the nascent Hockey Diversity Alliance, exhorting his sport to take seriously the need to combat racism. The players who kneeled before a Vegas Golden Knights-Dallas Stars game - Ryan Reaves, Robin Lehner, Tyler Seguin, and Jason Dickinson - were among the hundreds who forced the playoffs to pause later in August, hockey's contribution to the athlete sit-out protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
In effect, players such as Hockey Diversity Alliance co-founders Evander Kane and Akim Aliu now front the cause O'Ree has championed for decades. After his minor-league career ended, O'Ree recalls in his book, he took jobs spanning a wide gamut. He worked construction, drove a Pepsi truck, sold Pontiacs, and even supervised security at San Diego Chargers NFL home games. In 1996, not long after O'Ree turned 60, NHL executive Bryant McBride recruited him to the league's diversity outreach program; in the days before search engines were prevalent, McBride went so far as to ask acquaintances at the FBI to track down his phone number.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, O'Ree's ambassadorship kept him on the road 10 days a month, running hockey clinics and recounting his journey to youth of color from coast to coast. He said the fire to work - to make the game more accessible to kids who lack the means or opportunity to play - still burns within him. He hopes he'll soon get to travel for the first time since March and that he'll be able to stick with it for a couple more years.
In the meantime, hockey's best and most promising Black players continue to log major milestones. Blake Bolden, the first Black player in the National Women's Hockey League, joined the LA Kings last winter as an AHL scout. The Kings just drafted Quinton Byfield second overall, making him the highest-selected Black prospect in NHL history. The cast of standout players, present and past, with whom O'Ree keeps in touch - P.K. Subban, Wayne Simmonds, Anson Carter - includes Jarome Iginla, the newly elected Hall of Famer who wrote the foreword to "Willie."
O'Ree and Blake Bolden, the National Women's Hockey League's first Black player. Juan Ocampo / NHL / Getty Images
In his book, O'Ree makes clear that other Black men could have ascended to the NHL before him. He counts six predecessors or contemporaries who, in his view, were worthy of the honor: Herb and Ossie Carnegie, Manny McIntyre, Art Dorrington, John Utendale, and Stan Maxwell. If O'Ree's story is a testament to his own self-belief and persistence - "I stayed true to my goals (through) the things that I had to overcome," he said - it's also intertwined with a larger legacy.
O'Ree hopes his readers come to understand the magnitude of the challenges he endured, starting with the eye injury and recurrent bigotry. In Iginla's foreword, the legendary Calgary Flames captain contemplates the maltreatment O'Ree would have faced in the NHL: Every opposing agitator and prejudiced fan had a ready-made target to try to rile, knowing O'Ree, bearing a pioneer's burden, was out there alone.
All O'Ree did, Iginla marvels, was smile and proceed to prove he belonged. His example has uplifted generations.
"(Black players aren't in the NHL) because of their color. They're there because they have the skills and the ability to play in the National Hockey League," O'Ree said. "They've proven that. It's just a nice feeling to know that I was the person who made it possible for them to be there."
