No weather delays (yet), no curious waivers, no midnight burps from the server: The News of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, first reports that their hometown boy Jon Sim is signing a PTO with the Sound Tigers. The team is not fond of confirming these things until the guy’s in the house, so doubt we’ll get anything immediately official from that side.
It’s quite the interesting signing for a guy last seen going to Switzerland rather than coming back here in 2011. He was a force at times for this team, battling through an awful ankle injury and a classic feud with Joey Mormina to lead the team in scoring in the 2009 playoffs; in his obviously small sample, no one has averaged more regular-season goals per game (20 goals in 26 games, to go with 12 assists) as a Sound Tiger, and only three technically averaged more points per game (Josh Bailey 17 in 11, Mike Omicioli six in four, Mike Sillinger four in three).
That’s also three years ago and beyond; he’s 36. He had 12 goals and 20 assists combined in 56 games last year for the Rampage and the Phantoms; that total would’ve put him fifth on the Sound Tigers last year, a tiebreaker ahead of Johan Sundstrom.
But he’s been around, and he’s been to the mountaintop a time or two at a couple of different levels. This team had precious little of that kind of veteran, and certainly none who’d done it at those levels.
(We could probably do a billion of these, and I’ll do some arithmetic later, but let’s start here: Sim’s 469 NHL games are 12 times the total of his new teammates, combined.)
Suspect more tomorrow on that.
Sundstrom, meanwhile, was not on the ice this morning, dealing with a lower-body injury suffered late in Saturday’s game, Scott Pellerin said. He’s day-to-day. The rest of the team practiced, with Greg Miller in Sundstrom’s spot, and Brett Gallant swapping places with Alan Quine from the weekend’s opening lines. When we met before noon, Pellerin hadn’t heard from the Islanders about a possible call-up on defense for their road trip.
Edit: Syracuse’s Nikita Kucherov (5-4-9 in three games) bests Mike Halmo (5-3-8 in three) and Ryan Strome (2-6-8 in three) for AHL Player of the Week.
Fun from xkcd as always.
Sweet tribute to Marcia Wallace on the Simpsons last night. And RIP, Bobby Parker.