Kevin Lankinen Signs New Deal

Kevin Lankinen Finds a Home

Lankinen is why coaches pull their hair out. The undrafted Finn didn’t come to North America until he was 25 years old, joining Chicago‘s AHL club. He did as well as he could for an atrocious team there, so the Blackhawks brought him up a league to do the same for them.

After two seasons where he was abandoned on the ice by his teammates and abandoned off the ice by management, he signed with Nashville. Behind a good team, his somewhat shaky NHL numbers righted themselves.

Backing up an entrenched Juuse Saros and feeling pressure from young phenom Yaroslav Askarov, Lankinen signed a second one-year deal mid-season. It was a tepid vote of confidence but came with a $500K increase in pay.

Last season, though, neither he nor Saros lived up to expectations. Lankinen was let go and Saros was given an eight-year, $7.74 million per contract.

What to Expect

It’s a little hard to tell what Lankinen will provide Vancouver. While it’s hard to give much weight to the disaster teams he played behind in Chicago, ignoring them leaves us with little in the way of sample size. He was good in Nashville – very close to Saros in goals against and save percentage. So how much of a product of his teams is he?

He is a good goaltender, but he clearly thinks he can be more than a 20-game substitute. And he could very well be right. Four seasons and 112 games experience theoretically means he has room to grow. Being 29-years-old says otherwise. Vancouver needs more from him than being “just a backup” – at least early in the season.

Signing Kevin Lankinen as your backup doesn’t involve a lot of risk. He’s an NHL-level goaltender, even if he is a bit inconsistent. He has good size, covers the bottom of the net well, and has good positioning. If he cleans up a little bit more of his game, he could easily become a starter. At least, the Caucks certainly hope so.

With Thatcher Demko out for an unknown length of time, those 112 NHL games make Lankinen the veteran of training camp. Whether he will keep his spot remains to be seen.