- Fluto Shinzawa of the Boston Globe: Bruins center Carl Soderberg will be a UFA at the end of the season and he could explore the open market. He won’t be a top-two center with the Bruins, but another team might think he could be and pay him like he is. Shinzawa mentions the Capitals, Predators and Senators as teams where Soderberg could fill the No. 2 role.
- Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Dispatch: The only leverage that Ryan Johansen has left (barring an offer sheet) is to holdout. Some think holding out would put more pressure on the player, but his agent Kurt Overhardt doesn’t think so.
“No, not at all. If he’s not in camp, the pressure slips to the other side.”
Blue Jackets coach Todd Richards doesn’t think anything ever good comes out of a holdout, for the team or the player, but realizes there is a chance that it could happen.
“We want him in the lineup,” Richards said. “But we’ll move on without him if he’s not in the lineup. It’s like an injured player. If he’s not there, he’s not. You have to move on. You don’t have a choice.”
Overhardt and assistant GM Bill Zito met on Friday and are expected to do so again before the prospect tournament is over. Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen won’t get involved until both sides are able to get a little closer.
- Randy Miller of NJ.com: Flyers chairman Ed Snider said that after the 2012 season, Sergei Bobrovsky told then GM Paul Holmgren that he wouldn’t be re-signing. Bobrovsky was then sent to the Blue Jackets for a second and two fourth round draft picks.
“Then, the problem is, not only did we make a mistake on the long-term contract (Bryzgalov received), but Bobrovksy’s a young guy and he told Paul, ‘As soon as my contract’s up I’m out of here,'” Snider said Saturday. “He wasn’t going to re-sign with us. He was going to go back to Russia (or) he was going to go with another team, but he wasn’t going to be a second-string goalie for the rest of his life. So that was also a problem, and Paul made the best of the situation.”
“It’s not that we did not like Bobrovsky,” Snider said. “The whole thing was a fiasco. We can’t look back. What happened, happened, and here we are.”
- Randy Miller of NJ.com: Lost in translation. Swedish to French translation lead stomach injury for Flyers Pierre-Edouard Bellemare to a cracked skull.
“I got hit (in the head) in the playoffs and the newspapers said I had a stomach injury, and when you Google stomach injury from Swedish to French, it looked like I had a crack in my skull,” Bellemare said.
Bellemare didn’t sign with the Blackhawks as he didn’t think he’d get a fair shot to make the team.