Canucks sign Leighton, expose goaltender to waivers
PATRICK JOHNSTON
Michael Leighton’s good form with the Utica Comets has won him a National Hockey League deal.
The Vancouver Canucks announced Tuesday morning they had signed the 37-yearold goaltender to an NHL deal and placed him on waivers with the intention of returning him to the Comets, who are the Canucks’ American Hockey League affiliate.
Leighton’s deal runs through the rest of the season and will pay him different salaries, depending on whether he’s in the AHL or the NHL.
Leighton was signed by the Comets to a short-term professional tryout offer last month after the Canucks recalled Thatcher Demko and then lost Mike McKenna on waivers to the Philadelphia Flyers.
That left the Comets shortstaffed, with only Ivan Kulbakov under contract.
Since signing with the Comets, Leighton has started seven times and has won six straight games while posting a solid .915 save percentage. He also appeared in three games earlier this season with the AHL’s Ontario Reign, going 1-1 and posting a .859 save percentage.
Combined with last week’s Marek Mazanec trade, the Canucks will have four healthy goalies under contract when Thatcher Demko comes off injured reserve. The team initially suggested he would be back healthy this week, but he didn’t practise with the Canucks on Monday. (The team isn’t skating Tuesday so Demko’s status remains unknown.)
Even after the Mazanec trade, a signing of Leighton was suggested as still possible by general manager Jim Benning last week, though at the same time he also indicated the veteran goalie wasn’t seen inside the organization as a true NHL option.
To solve their NHL goalie problem, one that resulted in emergency junior recall Mike DiPietro getting lit up by the San Jose Sharks in his NHL debut, the Canucks traded a 2020 seventh-round draft pick to the Rangers for Mazanec, who has now backed up Jacob Markstrom for three straight games.
And while there were several other goalies with NHL experience and of similar apparent ability as Mazanec available to sign as free agents — Jeremy Smith, Chris Driedger, Jamie Phillips, Ken Appleby and Jeff Glass, for example — Benning said he relied on a list supplied by director of goaltending Dan Cloutier and goaltending coach Ian Clark.
Mazanec was on that list and while he was acquired via trade, in Benning’s estimation he was the right price even if it was a draft pick going the other way. (For those who dismiss the value of such a late pick, a seventh-round pick has been found to have roughly the same value as a third-round pick. Yes, very unlikely to result in a leading NHL player, but still roughly a 1 in 8 chance of turning out an NHLer.)
In adding Leighton, the Canucks do finally have a replacement for Richard Bachman, who tore an Achilles tendon in early December and is out long term. The moral here is not that signing Leighton is a bad thing, it’s that they could have ended up in the same spot, with two goalies in the AHL with NHL experience, but in a much simpler process.
Drafted in 1999 by the Chicago Blackhawks, Leighton has played 111 regular-season games with Chicago, Nashville, Philadelphia and Carolina. He helped the Flyers reach the Stanley Cup Final in 2010, winning eight times in 14 games that post-season, including a trio of shutouts.