NHL Notebook: Ken Holland receives one first-place vote for GM of the Year, Bruins likely to sign Milan Lucic following Taylor Hall trade, and more
By Cam Lewis
1 year agoJim Nill of the Dallas Stars had been named the recipient of the Jim Gregory General Manager of the Year Award, the NHL announced on Wednesday.
Nill narrowly edged out Don Sweeney, whose Boston Bruins put together the most successful regular season in NHL history at 65-12-5 but bowed out in the first round of the playoffs to the Florida Panthers. Bill Zito of the aforementioned Panthers finished third in voting while Tom Fitzgerald and Ron Francis of the breakout New Jersey Devils and Seattle Kraken came in tied for fourth.
In the official communication from the NHL, Nill was praised for signing head coach Pete DeBoer, who joined Scotty Bowman as the second head coach in NHL history to guide four franchises to the Conference Finals. The press release also mentioned Nill’s franchise-altering trio of picks from the 2017 draft: Miro Heiskanen (No. 3), Jake Oettinger (No. 26) and Jason Robertson (No. 39).
Oilers general manager Ken Holland finished in a tie with David Poile of the Nashville Predators for ninth. Both Poile and Holland received one vote and it was a first-place vote.
Last year, Holland finished fourth in GM of the Year voting. The three ahead of him were Joe Sakic of the Colorado Avalanche, Julien BriseBois of the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Chris Drury of the New York Rangers, who were the other three teams to reach the Conference Finals.
The award is decided by a panel of NHL executives and members of the media and the voting comes after the second round of the playoffs.
Milan Lucic is likely to return to the Boston Bruins
The seven-year, $42 million contract that Milan Lucic signed with the Oilers back in 2017 is officially going to come to an end in a couple of days and it looks like the 35-year-old is going back to where it all began. According to Rick Dhaliwal from The Team in Vancouver, Lucic will sign with the Boston Bruins once free agency begins.
Ironically, he’s heading back to the Bruins in a similar way to how he joined the Oilers in the first place. Just prior to inking that contract in 2017, Peter Chiarelli traded Taylor Hall to the New Jersey Devils for Adam Larsson. Earlier this week, the Bruins moved Hall in a camp-dump move to the Chicago Blackhawks, where he can be a mentor to young phenom Connor Bedard.
Lucic scored 39 goals and 104 points for the Oilers over 243 games. He was traded to the Flames for James Neal in 2019 and finished out the remaining four years of the contract in Calgary and he scored 35 goals and 83 points across 283 games. Lucic scored two goals and four points and won a gold medal with Canada at the World Hockey Championships this spring.
Quick notes…
- The Anaheim Ducks apparently have a retro jersey coming for the 2023-24 season that throws things back to their Mighty Ducks days in the 90s and early-2000s. This jersey brings back the old purple and green colour scheme but in a different pattern than the originals and it also features a different main logo than before.
- Ahead of the start of the draft in Nashville, a local media outlet that covers the Predators unknowingly interviewed Chicago Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson on the street. Davidson introduced himself as being from Chicago and the interviewer asked whether he thought that the draft had been rigged for the Blackhawks to get the No. 1 overall pick.
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