Source: Reuters

Sovietsky Sport is reporting that New York Rangers goaltender Steve Valiquette has signed with CSKA Moscow of the KHL.  According to their story, the signing has been confirmed by the league, though it hasn’t yet been posted on CSKA’s web site.

Valiquette played only six games for the Rangers this season, posting .852 save percentage and 3.74 goals-against average, before being demoted to the Hartford Wolf Pack, where he put up similar stats.  He suffered a season-ending finger injury after playing in only eleven contests for the Wolf Pack.  He was set to become an unrestricted free agent this summer.

This will be the second stint in Russia for the 32-year old Valiquette, who spent the 2005-2006 season with Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. He’ll join Rangers 2009 seventh round draft pick Mikhail Pashnin on CSKA Moscow.

This post originally appeared over at SNY Rangers Blog.

Like it did for the parent club in New York, the 2009-2010 Hartford Wolf Pack season came to an end on Sunday, though with decidedly less excitement and suspense.  Thanks to a 9-2 trouncing by the Worcester Sharks on Wednesday and a Bridgeport Sound Tiger victory over the Lowell Devils on Friday, the Pack’s extremely slim playoff hopes were officially dashed Friday night, even as the team rebounded to take a rematch against the Sharks, 3-2.

To their credit, the Pack came out and gave fans a good show in their final game at the XL Center on Saturday, riding a franchise record seven goal second period to a scrap-filled 7-5 whitewashing of the lowly Springfield Falcons.  They wrapped up the season in Bridgeport on Sunday with a 2-1 win over the Sound Tigers, capping off a 10-5-0 end-of-season run that proved to be too little, too late.

I’ll dig deeper into the whys and wherefores behind the Wolf Pack’s first finish outside the AHL’s playoff picture, and take a closer look at some individual performances, in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, here are three high-level issues that helped sabotage the Wolf Pack’s unlucky thirteenth season:

Read more…

In case you missed it over on SNY’s Rangers Blog, here’s my weekly review of the Hartford Wolf Pack.