The Vancouver Canucks get back to work after the All-Star Break with a couple of player moves ahead of their next game on Thursday night against Columbus.
It's now official: Alex Biega has received a new two-year contract as a reward for his solid performance on the blue line since being called up at the beginning of December.
It's the first one-way deal of his career for the 27-year old.
Secondly, as we discussed yesterday, Brandon Prust has indeed received the "Chris Higgins treatment."
In hindsight, it's easy to say that Jim Benning should never have traded for Prust last summer, but the Canucks' situation has shifted over the course of the season.
Benning may have misread the need to have another fighter on the team—according to
HockeyFights.com, fighting around the league has dropped again this season, from an average of 0.32 fights per game in 2015-16 down to 0.28 fights per game this year. That's less than half of the NHL's 0.60 fights per game back in 2008-09, when Prust was breaking into the league, a number that has on a steady decline.
Also, Prust's effectiveness might have been different if he hadn't suffered that gruesome ankle injury back on October 27. He only missed three and a half weeks of action before coming back and told
Brad Ziemer before the All-Star break that he may have returned to action too soon.
“I wasn’t really able to regain my confidence after,” Prust said. “I started feeling really good the past couple of weeks. The first few games of the (late December) road trip I felt like I had my speed back and was making plays. But too little, too late.”
Finally, the decision to part ways with Prust is triggered by a desire to find a full-time spot in the lineup for Jake Virtanen.
Virtanen has appeared in seven of the Canucks' 10 games since coming back from World Juniors and has played just fine, mostly in a fourth-line role. I don't like to read tooooo much into fancy stats, but according to
Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com, Virtanen leads Vancouver in 5-on-5 Corsi this season—in fact, he's the only player on the team over 50 percent, at 53.4.
By comparison, Prust is found near the bottom of the list, at 44.4 percent.
Prust turns 32 on March 16 and will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season.
The Canucks' decision to put him on waivers infers that no team was willing to trade for him as part of their playoff push. He'll need to do something pretty extraordinary in Utica if he hopes to earn a new NHL contract next season.
Did you check out any of the AHL All-Star Game on Monday?
I tried to follow Hunter Shinkaruk...
Great throwback uniforms, but the tournament format was far from traditional.
The four teams from each division started off playing a round-robin that consisted of nine-minute games, the first half at 4-on-4 and the second half at 3-on-3, which reflects their overtime format.
Shinkaruk's East Division failed to reach the final after going 1-2 in the round-robin portion. Michael Leighton of the Rockford IceHogs posted a shutout in the six-minute 3-on-3 final as the Central Division defeated the Atlantic Division 4-0 for the win.
To wrap up today—who woulda thought that Russia would be a better fit for David Booth than Vancouver was?
Booth has five goals and 14 points in 19 games with Admiral Vladivostock, currently a mid-pack team in fifth place in the KHL's East Division.
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