The Calgary Flames have signed Trevor Lewis to a one-year, $800K contract according to Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet. The veteran forward will be reunited with head coach Darryl Sutter, with whom he won two Stanley Cup championships during their time in Los Angeles.
If it wasn’t a Sutter roster before, the Flames are focused on making it one, acquiring bottom-six names like Lewis, Tyler Pitlick, and Blake Coleman in recent days. Even if Lewis isn’t the twenty-something that won those championships, he showed for the Winnipeg Jets last season that he can still be effective in a limited role. Though he scored just five goals and ten points, he happily welcomed tough defensive minutes and logged more penalty-killing time than all but two Jets forwards.
In the system that Sutter became famous for, the fourth-line isn’t there to contribute offensively. They slow the game down to a crawl and make sure nothing dangerous happens at either end. That’s all Lewis will be asked to do again in Calgary, and it’s a job he has done quite well over the years. Now that he’s 34 he might not be in the lineup for all 82 games, but for $800K it poses basically no risk to bring him aboard.
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