Category: Sports News

The Manitoba Moose have come to terms with Jaydon Dureau on a one-year contract beginning this fall.

A product of White City, Saskatchewan, the 24-year-old will look to stick with his second American Hockey League team over the past six seasons, to which he has played parts of each of the past five years with the Syracuse Crunch.

Selected in the fifth round of the 2020 NHL Draft by the Tampa Bay Lightning, Dureau has bounced between the Crunch and Tampa Bay's ECHL affiliate, the Orlando Solar Bears ever year.

Standing six-foot and 176 pounds, the slight winger has yet to find his scoring touch at the AHL level, despite putting up 29 goals and 73 points in 103 ECHL games. In 36 AHL games, he has just three goals and seven points.

Dureau was a point-per-game player at the WHL level, to which he played out his career with the Portland Winterhawks, scoring 65 times and adding 131 assists for 196 points in 207 games. 

The contract is a standard one-year, AHL agreement, meaning he can bounce between the AHL and ECHL with no issue. He would need to sign an NHL deal should the Jets feel the need to recall him to the big league. 

If James Malatesta can put it all together, he's going to be a force in the NHL.

Malatesta turned pro in 2023 after spending four outstanding years with the Quebec Remparts of the QMJHL. After amassing 187 points in junior and winning the QMJHL playoff MVP, he was off to the pros. He would total 56 goals if you take into account all the games he played in the Q, Q playoffs, and Memorial Cup.

James Malatesta played in 56 games for the Cleveland Monsters in his rookie season. He would score 12 goals and total 22 points. He has a motor that never quits and can skate really well, and it showed. Malatesta finished 11th on the team in scoring and 10th in games played. He did have a team-high 79 PIMs, though, which is how he plays his game.

Late in the season, in a surprising move, Malatesta was called up to play for the Columbus Blue Jackets. Due to the injury situation, Malatesta and several other Monsters got an opportunity to play some real NHL minutes.

He would make his NHL debut on March 26th against the Arizona Coyotes. He didn't get on the score sheet, but he did make his presence known. He would get 11:43 of ice time and get into a fight. Not a bad night.

Malatesta would get his first NHL point against the Philadelphia Flyers on April 6th, an assist. He played 10:58.

On April 13th in Smashville, after playing 9 games, he would have a career game. He played 12:55, had 3 shots, and scored his first goal. He also added an assist in the loss to the Predators. He was flying around the ice all night; he was fun to watch.

In the next game, the season finale at home against the Carolina Hurricanes, he would again have a good game. Malatesta scored his 2nd NHL goal while playing 13:01 on the ice. He is making himself highly visible.

He was returned to the Monsters after the CBJ season to help them win their division and the Calder Cup Playoffs.

Malatesta only played 9 games throughout the playoffs, scoring only a single goal and adding one assist.

The 2024-25 season saw Malatesta play a pair of games for Columbus in December. He averaged around 10:30 of ice time and was held off the score sheet. But it was important that he played. 

For Cleveland, he played in only 41 games and scored 14 points. Unfortunately for Malatesta and the Monsters, he suffered an upper body injury that held him out of the lineup until March. In a combo of injuries and a sophomore slump, Malatesta did not have the year he wanted. 

James Malatesta will need to step up and have a good season in 25-26. Why? Because he's going to be a restricted free agent next summer, and will need a new contract. GM Don Waddell doesn't hesitate to let players walk if he thinks they won't bring anything to the team in the future. So, he'll need to stay healthy and be productive. 

The Cleveland Monsters will be very young next season and will need all the help they can get. Malatesta will have Luca Del Bel Belluz, Hunter McKown, and Owen Sillinger with him. But they'll also have newcomers Oiva Keskinen, Luca Pinelli, and Jack Williams to put in some goals too. 

James Malatesta isn't expected to put in 25 goals or collect 50 points, but he is expected to contribute. He has a scoring touch and brings physicality to the ice. 

James Malatesta Scouting Report

Strengths:

Skating: Malatesta's skating is an asset, with excellent acceleration, speed, and the ability to drive the puck through the neutral zone. 

Energy and Intensity: He plays with a high motor, is not afraid to throw hits, and engages physically to win puck battles and create turnovers. 

Shooting: He possesses a quick and accurate wrist shot, often firing on the fly, and is a threat on odd-man rushes. 

Offensive Instincts: Malatesta is good at finding open ice, jumping on opportunities, and making quick plays to generate scoring chances. 

Weaknesses:

Decision-Making: Needs to improve his passing and off-puck play, as he can sometimes prioritize intensity over making the best play. He takes bad penalties sometimes due to his physicality. 

Offensive Creativity: While he can finish plays, he doesn't possess the vision or playmaking skills of a top-tier offensive player. 

Consistency: His production can be inconsistent, and he needs to find a way to translate his energy and physical play into more consistent offensive contributions. 

Overall:

Malatesta is a prospect with a high floor, likely to become a reliable bottom-six forward in the NHL. He brings a lot of energy, a strong work ethic, and the ability to contribute in various ways, making him a player who can impact the game even without elite offensive skills. If he can put it together, expect him to be pushing for a roster spot in Columbus soon. But first, he has to prove it in 25-26.    

Does he have a chance to make the team? Many say no, but I wouldn't count him out if I were you.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts on our forum below. 

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When the curtain fell on the 2024-25 NHL season, the Florida Panthers skated away with the Stanley Cup for a second year running, which consolidated their status as the best team in the league. Still, during the regular season, the Montreal Canadiens played them four times and won every single one, which is no small feat. When Patrik Laine went to the Cup Final and celebrated the Cats’ victory with captain Aleksander Barkov, he was teased about joining them and simply replied he was fine in Montreal, having beaten the Panthers at every turn this season.

The two sides met for the first time at the end of December in Florida, after the Christmas break, and rookie netminder Jakub Dobes had just been called up following Cayden Primeau's demotion. Coach Martin St-Louis wasted no time testing the young netminder and threw him straight in the deep end against the reigning champions. The youngster performed exceptionally well, stopping the 34 shots he received. Meanwhile, Kirby Dach took matters into his own hands and scored Montreal’s first two goals in a 4-0 win.

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In mid-March, the Panthers rolled into town looking for revenge but were denied by Samuel Montembeault, who was named the third star of the game thanks to 21 saves on 22 shots. Meanwhile, the Canadiens scored three goals despite taking only 15 shots on net. This wasn’t Sergei Bobrovsky’s best game of the season, far from it.

Two weeks later, the Canadiens were back in Sunrise and grabbed another win, this one by a score of 4-2. The win was the result of two power play goals and a lot of tenacity. Montreal took the lead twice and let the Panthers come back each time, but when they took their third lead, they held on and shut down the Cats in the third period. Captain Nick Suzuki led the charge with a pair of assists and the game-winning goal.

The fourth and final meeting was the closest one, the Habs skated away with a 3-2 overtime win on April 11th when the Canadiens needed the win to qualify for the postseason, and the Panthers were without a few regulars. Despite only shooting 21 times on Vitek Vanecek, Suzuki (twice) and Josh Anderson found the back of the net. The captain scored the game-winning goal less than 30 seconds into the extra frame.

Throughout the four duels, the Canadiens outscored the Panthers 14-5, and despite not bombarding the Panthers’ net, they found a way to be opportunistic and get the eight points that were up for grabs. A big part of the Habs’ success was being able to contain Florida’s best players; Barkov only got two points in the series, while Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett only had one. Of course, the fact that Bobrovsky had an .838 save percentage, Spencer Knight .840 SV, and Vanecek .833 SV didn’t hurt either.

On the Canadiens’ side, rookie blueliner Lane Hutson was the ringleader with seven points in the series, closely followed by Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovsky, who both had five points. Of course, Montembeault’s .935 SV and Dobes’ shutout were also essential keys to the Canadiens’ success.

Will Montreal be able to replicate the same success against the Florida outfit this season? It’s hard to predict, but one thing’s for sure: Bill Zito did everything he could to keep his championship roster together, and he succeeded. He kept all of his pending free agents, somehow managing to retain Aaron Ekblad, Sam Bennett, and Brad Marchand. Florida even managed to add some depth on defense, signing former Hab Jeff Petry at a team-friendly price for one year. The 37-year-old veteran wants one last opportunity to win the Stanley Cup, and he believes that Florida might just be able to go for a three-peat, something that hasn’t happened since the New York Islanders won four Championships in a row at the start of the 1980s.

In net, it looks like Bobrovsky will be backed up by free agent signing Daniil Tarasov after the Panthers traded away Spencer Knight last season to add Seth Jones to their already impressive blueline. Tarasov has only 65 games of experience in the NHL, with a 3.44 goals-against average and a .898 save percentage.

If the young Canadiens can replicate their performance against the Champions this upcoming season, it will be another confidence builder for the Habs. They’ll have their work cut out for them, though. Montreal’s penalty kill was exceptionally efficient against the Cats last season, only allowing one goal on eight opportunities, and now that Joel Armia and Christian Dvorak have left, the Canadiens will have to replace them on the special team units.

Photo credit: Eric Bolte-Imagn Images

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There is no denying Florida Panthers are one of, if not the deepest team in the NHL.

As they enter the 2025-26 season, Florida will be looking to become the league’s first back-to-back-to-back Stanley Cup Champions since the New York Islanders in the early 1980s.

Panthers General Manager Bill Zito went to work this summer with the intention of keeping the band together and seeing if this elite squad he’s built has what it takes to become the NHL’s next dynasty.

It was quite remarkable that he was able to retain a trio of high-end unrestricted free agents – Sam Bennett, Aaron Ekblad and Brad Marchand – while also extending Tomas Nosek, acquiring Daniil Tarasov and signing Jeff Petry.

But all those moves, along with giving a one-year extension to restricted free agent Mackie Samoskevich, has left the Panthers in a bit of a pickle.

Currently, Florida is over the over the NHL salary cap, which rose to $95.5 million this summer, by $3.725 million, according to PuckPedia.

Matthew Tkachuk, who played through a torn hip abductor and a hernia during Florida’s run to their second straight Stanley Cup, may still end up having surgery, which he said following the playoffs was a 50-50 option.

Now that he’s gotten married and had his day with the Stanley Cup, perhaps that surgery could be forthcoming.

If that’s the case, Tkachuk’s contract carries a $9.5 million average annual value (AAV), all of which would be removed from Florida’s total under the cap if he were to be placed on Long Term Injured Reserve (LTIR).

One of the rumors that has floated around in recent weeks was that Evan Rodrigues could be a casualty of Florida’s salary cap situation.

Rodrigues has two years remaining with a $3 million AAV on his deal.

In his latest edition of 32 Thoughts, NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman gave some insight into Florida’s roster situation, and specifically the Rodrigues rumors.

“I don’t believe that’s going to be happening,” Friedman said of a potential trade, adding that Florida considers Rodrigues a “really important player.”

Friedman went on to say that Tkachuk is expected to miss the start of the season, but should be back in time for the Winter Olympics in February.

That kind of timeline implies that Tkachuk will be placed on LTIR.

Friedman did not, however, say what Florida will do to get under the salary cap when Tkachuk does come off LTIR.

Eventually, Zito and the Panthers are going to have to address the issue, but it doesn’t sound like Friedman, or anyone else outside the organization, has gotten wind of what Florida’s plan is.

Time will tell.

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“Diverse representation within inclusive environments is proven to advance innovation, creativity, and decision-making – all of which are critically important to the growth of the sport and our business,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman wrote in his introduction to the NHL’s first – and only, so far – diversity and inclusion report, which it released in 2022. “Recognizing these facts, we are working to better understand and accelerate our engagement across all layers of diversity – including nationality, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and religion – and their nuances and intersections,” Bettman continued.

Last week, Bettman was named alongside NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, Florida Panthers’ captain Matthew Tkachukx6x and various representatives of other sports as a member of Donald Trump’s sports council. The council will be responsible for – among other things – playing an “important role in restoring tradition to college athletics, including … keeping men out of women’s sports.” Not what you’d call an opportunity for Bettman et al to gain a better understanding of the nuances of gender identity, by the sounds of it.

This is not the first time Bettman has given mixed messages around social issues. In 2023, for example, NHL tried to host a career fair aimed at recruiting a more diverse workforce (its inclusivity report noted that the league’s employees were roughly 84% white and 93% straight). The event, attached to that year’s All Star Game in Florida, quickly caught the attention of the governor’s office, which accused the NHL of discrimination – against white people. The league cancelled the career fair.

A few weeks later, the NHL again had the opportunity to stand for its diversity values when a handful of players refused to wear their team’s Pride-themed warmup jerseys. Instead, the NHL retreated meekly, encouraging “voices and perspectives on social and cultural issues.” That June – Pride month, no less – Bettman cancelled the Pride jerseys altogether, calling the furor around them “a distraction” from the intended message.

One wonders what he will call his own foray directly into the culture wars or, for that matter, how the NHL may characterize this particular moment of self-expression from the commissioner. It’s likely that Bettman’s participation in Trump’s sports council will fall into the “voices and perspectives on social and cultural issues” category the league talked about during the Pride jerseys fiasco. But seeing as the Trump seems fixated on getting trans women out of college sports – even though there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes in college sports, according to the president of the NCAA – this feels like a very specific kind of perspective on a cultural issue, doesn’t it?

What’s so aggravating about repeated allowances for anti-LGBTQ+ perspectives from the NHL under the guise of simply letting all opinions flourish equally, is how it pretends that these views are all morally equivalent when they’re not. Sure, the players who refused to wear a Pride-themed jersey can’t be forced to wear them, but it’s not like it was simply a fashion choice. Fundamentally, those players made that decision based on a worldview that refuses to accept LGBTQ+ people, including their fellow hockey players, as being equal to them and everyone else. It’s not the jerseys that were the problem – but they did a great job highlighting it.

Earlier this spring, Harrison Browne, the first transgender player in professional hockey, wrote that while in the NCAA, he was offered the option to have his own locker room and change his pronouns on the roster. “Looking back, I realize how important it is for trans and non-binary student athletes to have those options, whether or not they take them,” Browne wrote in The Walrus. “These choices provide a baseline of institutional acceptance and acknowledgment for gender-diverse athletes at all levels.” On Monday, Browne told the Guardian via email that “to see [Bettman, Gretzky, and Tkachuk] get behind an administration that is targeting marginalized communities, especially trans people in sports, is deeply disturbing and a huge step backwards in making hockey a more inclusive sport.”

And going backwards really isn’t Bettman’s thing, or it never used to be. When he accepted his job as commissioner in 1992, he told a room full of reporters that “the way a league performs well is by making its product as attractive as it can to the greatest number of fans.” He believed in growth, in other words – even up until 2022. What he risks now is stagnation, regression even. On that same day in 1992, Bettman said that he wanted to make hockey, a sport that at the time was seen as violent and retrograde, more “user-friendly.” And he acknowledged that to do it, he’d need to push some of the older owners into the future. “It may be that we are going to head in new, progressive directions that will make sense to every one immediately,” Bettman said. “For some, it may take a little more time.”

Maybe the diversity and inclusion stuff doesn’t totally make sense to Bettman in 2025 – other North American sports have decided that they don’t have the stomach to fight the culture wars under Trump either, and NFL commission Roger Goodell is also on the White House sports council. But Bettman should give the league’s diversity policies time to grow, rather than deliberately reversing course, hurting hockey’s players and fans, and ultimately jeopardising the future success of the sport for everyone. If that’s too much to ask, at the very least, if he’s invited to join a club created by a hostile and retrograde president, he should by now have the smarts to just say no.