Golden Knights sign veteran winger to PTO

The Vegas Golden Knights have signed forward Tanner Pearson to a professional tryout agreement. The deal gives Pearson a chance to fight for one of Vegas’ remaining bottom-six positions — a battle already being fought by Victor Olofsson, Keegan Kolesar, Brendan Brisson and Jonas Rondbjerg.

Pearson, 32, recently completed a one-year stint with the Montreal Canadiens. He was the return for Casey DeSmith in a pre-season swap with the Vancouver Canucks, though upper-body injuries and healthy scratches limited him to just 54 appearances. He scored 13 points in those outings — a career-low in years he played in more than 20 games. 

The move to Montreal ended Pearson’s stretch of five years with the Canucks, where he managed 114 points across 221 games. The bulk of that scoring came in his first year in Vancouver, when Pearson managed a career-high 45 points in 69 games. It continued the streak of 40-point scoring that he carried through six years with the Los Angeles Kings. 

But he’d lose that streak quickly after, with 34 points in 2021-22 marking the only time that Pearson has exceeded 20 points in the last four seasons.

The battle for ice time among Vegas’ bottom six now grows thicker, as the team looks to make up for off-season departures of lineup fixtures like William Carrier, Chandler Stephenson, Jonathan Marchessault and Michael Amadio. 

Those absences open plenty of minutes on Vegas’ bottom lines, though new signee Olofsson, and young prospects like Brisson and Pavel Dorofeyev, are likely to earn precedent — unless Pearson impresses enough to earn a contract of his own in Vegas’ training camp.