{"id":374291,"date":"2025-12-29T02:47:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T02:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/374291\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T02:47:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T02:47:09","slug":"mammoth-place-juuso-valimaki-on-waivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/374291\/","title":{"rendered":"Mammoth Place Juuso Valimaki On Waivers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mammoth announced Sunday they\u2019ve placed defenseman\u00a0Juuso V\u00e4lim\u00e4ki<\/a>\u00a0on waivers for the purposes of assignment to AHL Tucson.<\/p>\n

V\u00e4lim\u00e4ki, 27, has been IR-bound for the entire season and then some. The former Flames first-rounder played 43 games for Utah last year before being waived and reassigned to Tucson in January. Weeks later, he sustained a season-ending ACL tear and was given an eight-to-nine-month recovery timeline. Given the surgery was in early March, he ended up missing that target by a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

As expected, he won\u2019t stick around with the Mammoth after being medically cleared. He struggled to hold onto a bottom-pairing job in Salt Lake last year, averaging 16:33 per contest while being limited to a 2-3\u20135 scoring line and a -5 rating.<\/p>\n

The 6\u20192\u2033, 201-lb lefty will be an unrestricted free agent next summer after inking a two-year, $4.4MM extension with Utah in 2024. That deal came after V\u00e4lim\u00e4ki had put up back-to-back solid bodies of work in top-four minutes for the Coyotes, notching 51 points and a +2 rating in 146 appearances from 2022-24 while averaging 18:36 per game.<\/p>\n

When V\u00e4lim\u00e4ki got pushed down the depth chart thanks to the additions of Mikhail Sergachev<\/a>,\u00a0John Marino<\/a>, and\u00a0Ian Cole<\/a>\u00a0before Utah\u2019s inaugural season, his performance no longer justified his cap hit. While he\u2019s been costing $2MM against the Mammoth\u2019s picture while on IR, his cap impact will drop to $850K if he clears waivers and is reassigned to Tucson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mammoth announced Sunday they\u2019ve placed defenseman\u00a0Juuso V\u00e4lim\u00e4ki\u00a0on waivers for the purposes of assignment to AHL Tucson. V\u00e4lim\u00e4ki,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,159773,448,82,4584,765,48340],"class_list":["post-374291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-juuso-valimaki","tag-nhl","tag-sports","tag-transactions","tag-utah-mammoth","tag-waivers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}