The Arizona Coyotes have officially announced that Jay Beagle underwent successful core muscle surgery and will be out indefinitely. On Thursday, general manager Bill Armstrong indicated that the veteran forward could miss anywhere from eight weeks to the rest of the season, a disappointing result for someone just trying to stay active in the NHL.
Beagle, 36, has suited up 21 times for the Coyotes this season and has one goal. The four-year, $12M contract he signed in 2018 with the Vancouver Canucks will expire at the end of this year, meaning if he does miss the rest of 2021-22, it could be the last we see of the undrafted forward in the NHL. If it is, he had quite the career, playing 634 regular-season games to this point and winning the Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals in 2018.
Here are some more Coyotes notes...
- The team also announced that Kyle Capobianco and assistant coach Mario Duhamel have entered the league’s COVID protocol. Capobianco, 24, has played in 15 games for the Coyotes this season and has five points. That takes his career totals to 29 games and six points, as he has received a rare opportunity during this Arizona rebuild to play at the NHL level more regularly. The third-round pick has spent the last several years in the minor leagues, putting up big point totals for the Tucson Roadrunners.
- With Andrew Ladd still finding regular ice time with the Coyotes, it certainly appears as though the team might not get the extra 2023 third-round pick that was included in last summer’s trade from the New York Islanders. Remember, CapFriendly reported an update on the conditions a few days after the trade, indicating that if Ladd plays in just a single professional game (assumed to mean NHL or AHL) in 2022-23 while under his current contract or if he retires prior to the end of that season, the pick would not be sent to Arizona. That basically means it would only transfer if Ladd ends up on LTIR for the entire season, or the team finds out another way around the condition. (It is not clear, for instance, whether a buyout of this deal would secure the pick for them, should Ladd decide not to retire.)
- Of course, that may not matter given how well the trade has paid off so far for the Coyotes. With the 2021 second-round pick they received in the deal, the team picked over-aged defenseman Janis Moser, who has recently stepped into the NHL and made an impact as a 21-year-old. The Swiss defender has three points in his first five games while averaging close to 20 minutes and is one of just four players — and the only one from outside the first round — from the 2021 draft to play in the NHL so far.
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