Wings place three players on waivers

It’s waiver season! The Red Wings placed three players on waivers today and designated them to the Grand Rapids Griffins.

As Renaud Lavoie of TVA Sports yells at us who is on waivers, we can see that Harri Sateri, Chris Terry, and Jake Chelios are the Wings that were placed on waivers today.

All three of these players were destined to be on the Griffins this season – unless a miracle or several injuries happened.

They were all signed as free agents this summer to bolster the depth on the Griffins and be competitive under new Head Coach Ben Simon.

Chelios spent the last three seasons in the AHL with the Carolina Hurricanes’ farm team, the Charlotte Checkers. In 190 games for the Checkers, he was able to score 15 goals and 77 points. The 27-year-old will provide nice depth that the Griffins were missing on the blueline last year.

Chris Terry has been an AHL veteran for most of his career. The 29-year-old winger has played exactly 500 games in the league, as well as a solid 152 games up in the NHL with the Carolina Hurricanes and Montreal Canadiens. In those 500 AHL games, Terry has scored 183 goals and 440 points – he has not been under a 60-point pace since the 2011-12 season. That is insane consistency.

The Griffins lacked an offensive punch last season, Terry will surely give them that kick to get some key prospects like Evgeny Svechnikov and Givani Smith have stellar offensive seasons.

Because of Howard and Bernier no-doubt being the tandem for the Red Wings this year, it was a given Sateri would be sent down and on waivers eventually. The 28-year-old netminder Sateri spent most of his time last season with the Springfield Thunderbirds last season – making a total of 29 appearances for the Panthers’ farm team and posting a .927 sv% as well.

With the Panthers last season, Sateri did not look so great in those nine appearances from a raw numbers point-of-view. But he did have a Quality Start% of  71.4% – meaning that he had a better sv% that game than the average within the league. It’s a very small sample size, so I’m guessing that the three starts that he finished the night with under-.900sv%, really had an effect on his overall save percentage.

Sateri is a great AHL goaltender and a fringe NHL backup. A tandem of him and Patrik Rybar will shore-up the Griffin’s goaltending, a position where they were among the worst in the league last year.

Expect more cuts to be made as the regular season approaches.