A month after winning the Vézina Cup, Marc-André Fleury is no longer a member of the Vegas Golden Knights.
The Knights have already traded goalkeeper with the Black Hawks. But will Florey go to Chicago?
Sister Emily Kaplan said Vegas will host 23-year-old striker Mikael Hakarinen, a minor league player who has no points in 14 MLS games. In short, the main purpose of the deal is to allow the Knights to drop Florey’s last year contract, which is worth $7 million under the salary cap.
However, the deal took a funny turn from the start. Neither the Blackhawks nor the Golden Knights have yet confirmed the deal as of this writing. On Twitter, the Blackhawks simply posted an emoji hinting that they were about to have a big bang.
A few minutes later, Florey’s agent, Alan Walsh, wrote on Twitter that Florey had “obviously traded with Chicago.” Marc Andre will take the time to talk about it with his family in order to seriously assess his future in hockey. ”
At the time of his tweet, Walsh also wrote that Fleury had not yet heard of the Golden Knights, which appears to be validating information from The Athletic, according to which Fleury had heard about the deal on Twitter.
The former Penguins of Nevada concludes with four, sometimes boisterous, seasons. Claimed in the 2017 expansion draft, he quickly established himself as the star of the first team, leading the Knights to the Stanley Cup Final in their first season. However, the arrival of Robin Lehner as an assistant coach in February 2020 cut his role down, even though Fleury was Vegas’s No. 1 goalkeeper in the recent playoffs.
Last season, it was 26-10-0, with an average of 1.98, an efficiency of 0.928 and 6 closings. In the playoffs, the 36-year-old was 9-7 with an average of 2.04 and an efficiency of 0.918.
Florey will be only the second goalkeeper since 1981 (when the definition of the cup changed) to start the following season with a different team. The other is Dominic Hasek, who moved from the Buffalo Sabers to the Detroit Red Wings in the summer of 2001.