PR intern Maya Kash began the press conference by thanking her dad for letting her miss a half-day of school to attend and reminded the gathered reporters that no questions regarding acquiring any specific players would be answered due to tampering concerns.
Chris Kash: Thank you for coming. As you know this was at times a difficult season for the Millers, as we replaced our head coach and traded the face of the franchise in Nik Backstrom. We also fell well short of our goal of getting back to the CCHL Finals. We would like to take this time to congratulate Eugene Yip of the Calgary Chinook for his incredible regular season and post season run. We are very happy for Eugene to finally win the championship on his 4th trip to the Finals. We're also very pleased for Chris Wolter and his Reykjavik Puffin for their tremendous showing in the playoffs.
As for the Millers...
Coach Sommer has decided to resign, stating a desire to move back to the Northeast to continue his coaching career. We are very grateful to Roy for the fantastic job he did in turning the team around when he was hired and wish him nothing but success moving forward.
We are promoting Evgeni Nabokov from goaltending coach to the head coaching position. As everyone knows Evgeni began his North American career in Lexington as a member of the AHL Kentucky Thoroughblades, meeting his wife here and maintaining a vacation home in the Bluegrass area. He is very excited to have his first head coaching opportunity in the same area where he started his path to being one of the greatest goalies ever.
The assistant coaches will be former T-Blade Steve Webb along with returning coaches Ian Fraser and Jarrett Deuling. A new goalie coach will be announced at a later time.
Our offseason plans are, to be succinct, to get younger but not rebuild. We have identified 2 areas of the team that we need to upgrade: Goalie and a young Center who could eventually take over a top 6 role. To that end we are willing to discuss most of the players on the roster, but we are very reluctant to trade any prospects or high draft picks. We have decided to let the market determine our UFA resign and will entertain offers for any of them, including leading scorer Jeff Carter as well as Hank Zetterberg, Mike Green, Anton Khudobin, and the rest.
In looking at the team we feel we can deal from areas of depth on the roster, specifically on the wings and defense. With Brock Boeser joining the club and Teravainen finally establishing himself, we feel comfortable parting with a scorer such as Mike Hoffman, Rick Nash, or Wayne Simmonds. Zack Smith came to us last year to request a trade and we are willing to let him move on as well.
On defense we of course will be keeping Josi, as well as Fowler and Pesce. Rasmus Ristolainen, Brendan Dillon, and Dmitri Orlov are all available if they can bring us a #1 G or young Center.
To sum up, we are open to trading any and all of our UFAs: Carter, Zetterberg, Bozak, Fisher, Cogliano, Gianta, Green, and Khudobin.
Roster players available include Hoffman, Nash, Simmonds, Zack Smith, Orlov, Dillon, Ristolainen, and Reimer.
Needs: #1 Goalie and a young, projectable #1 or #2 Center.
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