Wednesday, September 07, 2016

Handing Out Camp Invites (Sep 7)

The Columbus Blue Jackets have offered a training camp spot to veteran defenseman Marc-Andre Bergeron, who last played in the NHL back in the 2013 season with the Carolina Hurricanes.  The 35-year old has played the last three seasons in Switzerland, where he has continued to put up some reasonable numbers, so it may be worth one more kick at the can for an NHL shot.

However, with the current youth movement on this team, it would have to take a pretty good training camp or he would have to convince the coaching staff that his veteran leadership would carry some weight with the kids, like Seth Jones or Ryan Murray, to carry any value into a regular season contract.

The Los Angeles Kings have added Devin Setoguchi to their training camp roster, giving the former 31-goal scorer another shot and cracking the NHL once again.  Setoguchi played the 2016 season in Switzerland as well and had an okay year.  The 29-year old had a small stint with the Calgary Flames in the 2015 season, playing in only 12 games that year and spent the rest in the AHL.

As much as the Kings' depth at forward is looking fairly questionable on paper, it just doesn't seem very likely that a guy like Setoguchi has the wherewithal to make that jump again.  His last stint didn't last very long and he was only okay in Davos last year

Early on Wednesday, the Boston Bruins announced that forward Peter Mueller would be joining their side for training camp in a few weeks as well.  A former 1st round pick in 2006, Mueller couldn't quite find his legs in the NHL and after stints in Phoenix, Colorado and Florida, he has spent the last three seasons in Europe, the 2016 season was played with Malmo in Sweden, where he was 2nd on the team in scoring.

The Bruins have some depth in their organization and they could likely use the push of a PTO to give them a little scare.  I'm not sure that Mueller will impress that greatly, but he certainly found a good organization to at least give a try with.

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