Laine is there strictly for training purposes: "He won't play for us this season," Jalonen said.
Jalonen, the former bench boss of the Finnish national team, coached Laine at the 2016 World Championship.
Laine is one of the many restricted free agents around the league without a contract. That list shrunk by one yesterday after Mitch Marnersigned his deal, which could provide a ripple effect throughout the NHL.
Laine's countryman and fellow RFA Mikko Rantanen has taken a similar route, skating with Storhamar Dragons of the Norwegian league.
The Jets sniper was inconsistent last year, scoring 18 of his 30 goals during a 12 games stretch in November. He said last month he's "prepared for anything" and will play "somewhere" this season.
The Minnesota Wild signed defenseman Jared Spurgeon to a seven-year extension with a $7.575-million average annual value, the team announced Saturday.
Spurgeon was set to hit unrestricted free agency after the 2019-20 season. The 29-year-old set career highs in goals (14), assists (29), and points (43) last year.
The new deal will make him the 11th-highest-paid defenseman in the league in 2020-21, just ahead of teammate Ryan Suter.
The 5-foot-9, 167-pound Spurgeon may not have the conventional look of an elite shutdown defender, but that's exactly what he is. Among blue-liners who logged at least 500 minutes at five-on-five last year, Spurgeon allowed the 15th-fewest expected goals and the 11th-fewest high-danger scoring chances per 60 minutes, according to Natural Stat Trick. And they aren't soft minutes - Spurgeon matches up against opponents' top lines.
The extension marks new general manager Bill Guerin's first major splash with the Wild.
The longstanding public contract negotiation between the star forward and Toronto Maple Leafs is now over after the two sides agreed on a six-year, $65.36-million deal Thursday. After it was all said and done, Marner opened up about how difficult the process was in an interview with TSN's Darren Dreger.
"Guys talk about the stress and everything like that, but until you go through it you don't really understand it, but I'm happy it's over with," Marner told Dreger.
Marner said talks really escalated in the last two days.
"(I pushed) pretty hard, I knew we were close so I just wanted to kind of be more a part of it," he said. "In the last 48 hours or so I just made sure that I expressed to Kyle a couple times what the feeling was and what we had and what we wanted to do going forward."
Marner added that William Nylander's contract stalemate a year ago played a part in his decision to get a deal done. Nylander waited until Dec. 1 to sign and when he returned to the lineup, it took him a while to get back into game shape and find his footing. Marner remembers Nylander telling him how much of a grind the whole process was mentally and physically.
However, Nylander was back home in Sweden during his drawn-out negotiation, while Marner, a native of Markham, Ontario - a suburb of Toronto - couldn't escape public scrutiny.
"I was walking my dog and I had like a 13-year-old kid yelling at me from across the park, screaming at me for not signing," Marner said. "That's the Toronto fan base and it's great to be a part of for another six years."
The pressure to sign didn't stop around the neighborhood, as Marner and his family - specifically his father, Paul - took some heat on social media.
"Social media has its benefits, it's good for certain things, but it's also good for a lot of bad things. People express their hate for people on that. It's something that a lot of athletes go through on social media, is the hate," he said.
"It was more so seeing all the stuff said about my family that made me disappointed and mad. I expected stuff to come at (agent Darren Ferris) and myself, but I saw a couple comments about my father and stuff like that that nobody is gonna like seeing or reading. It was pretty disappointing to see people express themselves about my family and my family name."
Many Twitterusers were under the impression Paul Marner was a driving force in the negotiations and fed information to Dreger throughout the process.
With the business side of things now in the past, Marner can just focus on hockey.
"I'm super excited," Marner said, who was on his way to the airport to join the team in St. John's, Newfoundland for training camp.
Check out theScore's 2019-20 fantasy hockey draft kit for all the advice you need leading up to the start of the season.
Yahoo fantasy sports (finally) ditched penalty minutes as a category in standard leagues. It's been replaced with hits in head-to-head leagues and blocks in head-to-head points leagues. To account for both styles, these rankings take the following categories into account:
Skaters
Goalies
G
Wins
A
GAA
PPP
SV%
SOG
SO
Hits
Blocks
These rankings are based on 12-team leagues and factor in positional value. The value of certain positions can change depending on the size of the league. Positional eligibility is courtesy of Yahoo.
Exhale, Leafs Nation; the great standoff has ended.
Mitch Marner is a very rich young man and the Toronto Maple Leafs have a long-term commitment from one of the best hockey players on the planet. That’s the stripped-down, unemotional truth of Friday evening’s $65.4-million news dump.
The Marner-Leafs soap opera is over and both sides, generally speaking, got what they wanted without causing too much damage to egos involved, the on-ice product, or the fan base. It's now go time for the franchise. As the preseason ramps up, the business of hockey can finally be set aside for another day.
Marner's six-year extension worth $10.9 million annually is front-loaded. And, in signing on through the 2024-25 season, the 22-year-old forward is now scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent at 28.
Here’s the breakdown of Marner’s earnings - base salary and signing bonus paid out on July 1 - for each year of the pact, according to PuckPedia.
Year
Base
Bonuses
19-20
$700K
$15.3M
20-21
$700K
$14.3M
21-22
$750K
$9.608M
22-23
$750K
$7.25M
23-24
$750K
$7.25M
24-25
$750K
$7.25M
The extension makes Marner the NHL’s seventh-highest-paid player for the 2019-20 season. In terms of cap hit, he now lives between $11-million teammate John Tavares and a trio of stars - Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, and Carey Price - making $10.5 million. In short, the 94-point forward who grew up in the sprawling Toronto suburb of Markham is in good company.
Now, although Marner’s a terrific, dynamic winger who plays in all situations, he’s probably being overpaid by $1 million to 2 million in the short term. (This is what happens when a team’s brass pushes for more years, and a player’s camp digs its heels in on more money). If Marner can become a 100-point driving force on a consistent Stanley Cup-contending squad, that annual hit will look beyond reasonable by the second or third year.
All in all, based on Marner's skill set and resume, the deal is a fairly safe bet.
Omar Rawlings / Getty Images
The cap hit works for the Leafs because the books have been carefully constructed for it to work. General manager Kyle Dubas proclaimed last July that he would sign Auston Matthews, Marner, and William Nylander, and after countless discussions, he's done just that. It wasn’t easy - two of three deals were partially negotiated in public, Nylander’s shortened 2018-19 season proved fruitless, and Matthews has one of the most player-friendly contracts in hockey - but everything is now in place. Dubas, for all intents and purposes, accomplished what he set out to do.
Head coach Mike Babcock has an embarrassment of riches at his disposal, which, although not a new development, is amplified now. The Leafs’ nucleus is firmly six players deep - forwards Matthews, Tavares, Marner, and Nylander, defenseman Morgan Rielly, and goaltender Frederik Andersen - and all six are under contract for at least the next two seasons.
With that stability, the pressure’s on Marner and Nylander to perform to their paychecks, Matthews to stay healthy and keep scoring at a near-historic rate, Babcock to make the right coaching decisions, and Dubas to work his magic around the fringes of the roster in order to support the expensive core.
In more ways than one, Toronto will act as an interesting case study moving forward. For starters, how will paying a select few mass amounts of money affect roster construction? Will there be enough dough to go around to make everyone happy in the chase for a Cup?
Toronto’s four highest-paid players will account for roughly 50% of the $81.5-million cap in ‘19-20. Eleven players on the current 23-man roster are earning $925,000 or less. That's an incredibly top-heavy payroll.
Claus Andersen / Getty Images
The Leafs have now locked up not one, not two, but three high-end players coming off entry-level deals. Just about every NHL team has one high-end kid - maybe two. But three - and to commit so much cash and so much term to each of them - is rare and, frankly, an excellent problem to have. The Leafs should consider themselves lucky.
Then there’s the staggering of expiration dates. The contracts for Matthews and Nylander are up following the 2023-24 season, while Tavares and Marner can test free agency a year later. Ideally, the Leafs likely would have wanted all four attached to a different free-agent class. Dubas did OK, since spreading these future issues over two years is not the worst-case scenario.
All of this would be cause for concern if the four players being handed the keys weren’t all under 30, ultra-talented, tailor-made for the modern NHL, and extremely motivated to win the franchise’s first Cup in 50-plus years. Overall, the Leafs are in tremendous shape relative to the past few decades.
On Friday, they got some distracting business out of the way prior to the opening game of the exhibition schedule. That should be celebrated, regardless of the financial commitment.
The Leafs also finalized something else. Their Cup window is officially set at four years. It could prove to be longer, but that’s the baseline right now. Now, onto the hockey.
Hockey legend Stan Mikita was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, researchers and his family announced, according to TSN's Rick Westhead.
Boston University CTE Center director Dr. Ann McKee revealed the findings for the first time Friday night at the Concussion Legacy Foundation's Chicago Honors dinner.
"Stan Mikita was diagnosed with (two) neurodegenerative diseases that our research has shown are associated with a long career in contact sports such as ice hockey: CTE and Lewy Body Disease," Dr. McKee said, according to Westhead.
Mikita pledged his brain to the research team in Boston before his death in 2018.
The late NHL star is now the 11th known former player and the first member of the Hall of Fame to have tested positive for CTE, the disease linked to repetitive brain trauma caused by contact sports.
Mikita, who was inducted into the Hall in 1983, died in August 2018 at the age of 78.
