Hill, champion Knights strike 2-year extension
The Vegas Golden Knights have reached a two-year contract extension with goaltender Adin Hill, the team announced Friday.
The deal is worth $4.9 million per year.
Hill’s value seemed to go up with each new round of the postseason. In leading the Vegas Golden Knights to the Stanley Cup, the 27-year-old veteran climbed the depth charts among free agent goaltenders.
Playing on an expiring deal that carried a $2.2 million salary cap hit, Hill raised his profile with series wins over the Edmonton Oilers and Dallas Stars just to get to the Final. And then, opposed by the postseason’s hottest goaltender, Florida’s Sergei Bobrovsky, Hill stole the show in the title round, as well.
All told in the postseason, Hill was 11-4 with a 2.17 goals-against average and a .932 save percentage, and his only loss of the Cup finals — Game 3 — came in overtime.
“We’re very happy for him. He’s a guy that’s been through some injuries and had to work his way back into the lineup,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said of Hill during the Final. “He’s done a great job for us obviously, and he’s a big reason why we’re here.”
All that said, as teams weighed his complete body of work this summer, he was still a netminder who had never started 30 games in a season before and had won just 26 games across the past two regular-seasons.
But Hill, a 2015 third-round pick of the Arizona Coyotes, has a career 2.67 goals-against average to go with a .910 save percentage, numbers often associated with decent-sized summer deals for goaltenders, and he also has five shutouts in 88 starts.
