{"id":76064,"date":"2025-07-19T18:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T18:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/76064\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T18:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T18:49:09","slug":"maxime-lajoie-linked-to-khl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/76064\/","title":{"rendered":"Maxime Lajoie Linked To KHL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Playing time in the NHL has been hard to come by in recent years for unrestricted free agent defenseman Maxime Lajoie<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 As a result, it appears that he may be changing things up for next season.\u00a0 Artur Khairullin of Sport-Express reports (Telegram link<\/a>) that the blueliner could be signing with Avangard Omsk of the KHL.<\/p>\n

The 27-year-old made a good first impression back in 2018-19.\u00a0 Not really on the NHL radar for Ottawa heading into training camp, he wound up making the team and played in 56 games with them before being sent down late in the season.\u00a0 Unfortunately for him, Lajoie\u2019s playing time at the top level has largely been sparse since then as he has managed just 21 more appearances between Ottawa, Toronto, and Carolina.<\/p>\n

Last summer, Lajoie inked a one-year deal with Seattle worth a guaranteed $500K but after he cleared waivers in training camp, he was not brought up the rest of the way.\u00a0 As a result, he spent the full season with AHL Coachella Valley and had a productive year, notching four goals and 34 assists in 70 games, putting him inside the top 20 for points by a defenseman.<\/p>\n

That output was largely in line with his AHL production over his career.\u00a0 Across four different organizations over parts of eight seasons, Lajoie has 34 goals and 160 assists in 378 games.\u00a0 Notably, he qualifies as a veteran in the AHL, with teams only being able to play five of those (with more than 320 professional games) on any given night, a rule that has squeezed some capable players out of a job.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear if that rule is hindering Lajoie now or if he\u2019s merely looking to try something new since he has been cemented as an AHL regular but it appears he has at least one overseas option available to him now.\u00a0 If he makes it known that he\u2019s open to a move across the pond, Lajoie is someone who could command interest from other leagues as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Playing time in the NHL has been hard to come by in recent years for unrestricted free agent…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":76065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[21619,52776,293,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-76064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-khl","9":"tag-maxime-lajoie","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114881401314678488","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}