For the first time in well over a year, John Klingberg is suiting up in an NHL game.
The former All-Star defenceman will make his Oilers debut playing alongside Darnell Nurse on the team’s second pairing when Edmonton hosts the Detroit Red Wings on Thursday night.
The Oilers inked Klingberg to a one-year, $1 million contract back on January 17. It was reported earlier in the month that the 32-year-old was looking to resume his NHL career after undergoing hip resurfacing surgery and Edmonton was immediately a primary target.
This is a low-risk, high-reward move for the Oilers. If Klingberg can be anywhere near the player he was during the first few years of his career with the Dallas Stars, the team will have found a major piece to the puzzle on their blueline. If he struggles, Klingberg’s contract can be buried in the minors with no salary cap penalty.
The Stars selected Klingberg in the fifth round of the 2010 draft, the same year they used the 11th overall pick on goaltender Jack Campbell. Klingberg spent three seasons playing in Europe before coming over to North America, representing Sweden at the 2011 and 2012 World Juniors and winning the SEL Championship with Skelleftea in 2012-13.
After scoring 12 points in 10 games with the Texas Stars of the American Hockey League, Klingberg was called up to make his NHL debut with Dallas in 2014-15. He scored 40 points in 45 games while logging 21:50 per night and finished fifth in Calder Trophy voting for the league’s best rookie.
The Stars liked what they saw from the young defender and got him signed to a seven-year, $29.75 million contract in April of 2015. Klingberg took a step forward in his second season with the Stars, scoring 58 points in 76 games and finishing sixth in Norris Trophy voting.
From Klingberg’s rookie season in 2014-15 through the end of that seven-year deal in 2021-22, he ranked eighth among NHL defencemen with 374 points across 552 games and 24th among all defenders in total time on ice.
He finished sixth in Norris Trophy voting twice during that stretch and helped the Stars reach the Stanley Cup Final in 2020 during the bubble tournament in Edmonton. Klingberg finished second in team scoring during that playoff run with 21 points in 26 games and scored two game-winning goals.
Before the start of the 2021-22 season, the Stars and Klingberg started negotiating a new long-term contract with the defenceman set to hit unrestricted free agency the following summer. The two sides weren’t able to come to an agreement and Klingberg expressed that he didn’t feel appreciated as a player as talks stalled during the season.
The Stars had inked star defenceman Miro Heiskanen to an eight-year, $67.6 million contract in July of 2021 and they made it clear when free agency opened in 2022 that they were prepared to move on from Klingberg. Dallas signed forward Mason Marchment and defenceman Colin Miller to free-agent deals worth a combined $6.35 million, leaving little room to fit Klingberg, who had been seeking nearly $8 million annually during the season.
Klingberg wound up signing a one-year, $7 million deal with the basement-dwelling Anaheim Ducks a few weeks into free agency. He scored 24 points in 50 games on a terrible Ducks squad and was moved to the Minnesota Wild ahead of the trade deadline. Come playoff time, Klingberg and the Wild were dropped in the first round in six games by his former team, the Stars.
After an underwhelming season between Anaheim and Minnesota that saw him score 33 points and post a minus-25 rating, Klingberg inked another one-year contract in free agency, this time with the Toronto Maple Leafs for $4.15 million. Klingberg’s time in Toronto only lasted 14 games before hip resurfacing surgery in November of 2023 ended his season.
Klingberg told Jim Matheson of the Edmonton Journal that he was back to skating in April following surgery and that he started ramping things up in August before getting back up to game shape practicing with the Brampton Steelheads of the Ontario Hockey League. He added that he’s skating without pain for the first time in his professional career.
“The big part of my game is possession, creating offence but I want to be reliable defensively which I haven’t been the last several years. I have to prove I can be somewhat of a corner piece on a successful team,” Klingberg said.“The (skating) motion I have now is better than I’ve ever had. No pain, which is exciting. Pain has always been there but I was able to play through it. Yet over the last few years, it got worse and worse. It got to where I was thinking I could never play another 80 games (season). That’s when we decided to go down that (surgery) road. I’m happy I did.I lost a lot, especially without the puck. I had to react to what other players were doing with the puck. With the puck, I didn’t feel I could beat players as often as before but I still thought I could control the game somewhat. For sure it was a struggle without the puck if the players were going right or left and I had to react. It was like I kept a bit of distance because I didn’t want to give up a grade A (chance).”
During last year’s Western Conference Final with the Stars, Kris Knbolauch moved Cody Ceci off of the second defensive pairing with Darnell Nurse and replaced him with Philip Broberg. The young Swede thrived with the opportunity and Nurse elevated his game when playing with a mobile puck-mover.
That performance late in the playoffs netted Broberg a nice raise in the off-season, as the St. Louis Blues signed the restricted free agent to a two-year, $9,161,83 offer sheet that Edmonton opted not to match.
While it was difficult to let go of a promising young defender, the Oilers ultimately decided that Broberg’s contract was too rich and that they could find an upgrade for the second pairing during the season. If Klingberg is healthy and can be the player that he used to be, they might have done exactly that.
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