Posted in Transactions, Toivonen April 26th, 2007
Toivonen gets to withstand a barrage of pucks for one more year
Sportsline reports that the B’s signed Hannu Toivonen to a one-year extension Thursday, ensuring that the goalie prospect will have at least one more year to develop in the Bruins’ system.
With Tuukka Rask slated to join the Bruins next year, and with Tim Thomas firmly entrenched as the starter right now, it begs the question of what the goaltending situation is going to look like for next year.
As I mentioned last year (to an onslaught of dissenting opinions), the best situation for the Bruins last year would have been that Toivonen stepped up his game and took the #1 goaltending job from the then 32 year old Tim Thomas. This would have allowed Thomas to either have been decent trade bait or become possibly the best backup goaltender in the league.
Now the Bruins will have a 33 year old goaltender between the pipes and two hot prospects battling over who could be the future franchise goaltender for the Bruins (and, yeahyeahyeah I know Thomas could still legitimately be around for the next five years). The problem is that you need to give your prospects a chance to play. If Thomas was destined to be a backup, then you could have given Toivonen the starts in Boston and Rask the starts in Providence. But now, barring a timeshare situation in Providence, only one of them is going to get significant playing time. The Bruins will probably look for a veteran to back up Thomas.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Transactions, Toivonen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
