JOHN GRESS
The NHL's waiver wire is and will continue getting a major workout between now and Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST, the deadline for teams to finalize their 23-men rosters and comply with the $59.4-million salary cap.
Usually, waivers are an overblown relatively uninteresting exercise for this reason: Few teams have the cap space to add a key component and even fewer teams are so flush with prospects that they are willing to let a legitimate young player get away.
It's why the two players who actually did get claimed today are mildly interesting.
Tampa took a prospect that few outside the inner circles of the game know - Mattias Ritola, a 23-year-old from Borlange, Sweden, who played for the Detroit Red Wings' Grand Rapids AHL affiliate last year and scored 42 points in 73 games. Ritola was the 103rd player chosen in the 2005 draft, the same one in which the Red Wings landed Justin Abdelkater, Darren Helm and defensive prospect Jakub Kindl. The connection there: Tampa is run by former Red Wings' executive Steve Yzerman, who knows Ritola better than most and must think that he can bolster Tampa's depth up front (which was undermined in recent days by injuries to Dominic Moore and Teddy Purcell). If Ritola can do for Tampa what Ville Leino, a similar prospect/project, did for the Philadelphia Flyers, then it will be a worthwhile gamble.
Then there were the New York Islanders, who scooped up Michael Grabner, the ex-Canuck, from fellow Eastern Conference also-ran Florida. Grabner is of interest, largely because he was in the package of players Vancouver surrendered to the Panthers in order to acquire defenceman Keith Ballard. Florida has a collection of forwards, all of whom fall into the same basic category - NHL journeymen, who can play but not necessarily star in the league. Grabner started camp as their fifth left winger and clearly didn't do enough to leapfrog David Booth, Cory Stillman, Chris Higgins or Rostislav Olesz on the depth chart. With far fewer players to work with, and with injuries sidelining both Kyle Okposo and Rob Schremp, the Austrian-born Grabner will get a far greater opportunity to stick in the NHL this season with the Islanders.
The Canucks also found a taker for Shane O'Brien's $1.5-million contract, when the Nashville Predators took it on at the cost of Ryan Parent, who was then immediately waived by Vancouver, for the purposes of sending him to the minors. Weirdly, O'Brien will likely inherit some of the minutes that Dan Hamhuis used to play for the Predators. After playing his entire six-year career in Nashville, Hamhuis left this past summer to sign as an unrestricted free agent ... with Vancouver. More strange stuff: A few days before the July 1 free agency period was to start, Nashville actually traded Hamhuis's rights to Philadelphia - and received Parent in exchange.
Sometimes, there really is an oddly incestuous quality to way NHL transactions unfold.