If you’ve been skipping out on Boltsmag lately, you haven’t missed much. There’s some news for the team and the franchise but at the same time — I haven’t been posting due to computer problems that kept me offline most of last week sans my post about Hockeybay, USA.
Nikita Alexeev and Dmitry Afanasenkov both took their qualifying offers. Afanasenkov, who is playing on team Russia in the World Cup this summer, will be making slightly less than 900 thousand dollars while Nikita Alexeev will be making 1.182 million dollars next year…
Both players will have to clear waivers before they are sent down.
This is a make-or-break year for Alexeev and if he comes out of training camp (if there is a training camp in 2004 ) without making the squad, it’s my personal opinion that he will be shipped off ffor a defensiveman. It’s sadly ironic that it mirrors, in reverse, the trade that brought Fredrik Modin to the Tampa Bay Lightning (he was traded from Toronto for defensiveman Cory Cross).
Meanwhile on another front, Pavel Kubina and Rusland Fedotenko are back in black — way in the black for that matter. Kubina has been re-upped after his arbitration hearing, for two years at an average of 3.25 million a year. This is much less than his request of 8-odd million for 2 years that Petr Svoboda (yes, Lightning fans, that Petr Svoboda) was arguing for.
Meanwhile, Rusland Fedotenko took home a nice raise in his arbitary hearing. He is scheduled to make 1.5 million in his one year cotnract while having made 950k last year. fedotenko proved to be a crucial cog for the Lightnign during the playoffs and erased many doubts and qualms fans had after he was acquired from the Philadelphia Flyers.
three Arbitration hearings are still yet to happehn for Lightning players — Fredrik Modin, Corey Sarich and Corey Stillman.
