Trade deadline pickup Mattias Janmark settling in with Golden Knights

By Justin Emerson

Sunday, April 25, 2021 | 2 a.m.

When Mattias Janmark joined the Golden Knights two weeks ago after being traded from Chicago, he wasn’t necessarily walking into an unfamiliar situation.

While Janmark had never been traded before, he was familiar with being the new person in the room after joining the Blackhawks during the offseason after five years with Dallas. And, of course, hockey is hockey.

That could help explain his smooth transition to Vegas, where the 28-year-old forward after six games seems to be a good fit with a Golden Knights team gearing up for a lengthy postseason run.

“It’s been the luxury of having a great team and playing winning hockey,” Janmark said. “I’ve had every opportunity to really find my game.”

In their first four years as a franchise, the Golden Knights have developed a reputation throughout the league as being a place players want to be. They’ve signed big-name free agents like Alex Pietrangelo and Paul Stastny, and traded for stars on expiring contracts like Mark Stone, Max Pacioretty and Robin Lehner, all of whom went on to sign multiple-year extensions.

Part of it is just how hockey works — it’s rare when a team swings a trade for a rental star — but also part of the Golden Knights’ culture. Janmark, like several past deadline gets, is a free agent at the end of the year with no guarantee of a future in Vegas. It’d be easy to come in and feel like a short-timer.

But that’s not the case with players Vegas gets. Defenseman Alec Martinez was acquired at last year’s trade deadline after spending his whole career with the Kings and said he was welcomed with open arms and never felt like he was intruding on a team where he didn’t belong.

“I think right away I felt like I was part of the team,” Martinez said. “I think that it speaks to the quality of people that we have in this room. I can say that I never felt like that. I felt like I was part of it as soon as I got here. It’s an awesome group and when you have a good group of guys like that you tend to have that feeling pretty quickly.”

Sometimes it doesn’t work.

Vegas traded three draft picks in 2018 to get Tomas Tatar from Detroit and it quickly became clear that he didn’t gel with his new group. He played in only eight of the Golden Knights’ 20 playoff games, and was traded to Montreal that offseason in the Pacioretty deal, just seven months after he arrived.

In a less extreme example, Nick Cousins came over from Montreal at last year’s deadline as a pending restricted free agent. He played all but three of Vegas’ playoff games, though was not tendered a contract in the offseason. That essentially amounts to releasing him, though it was more salary cap-driven than it was about a bad fit.

The obvious hope is that no such issues arise with Janmark. He’s made an impact right away, picking up an assist in his team debut, then scoring his first Golden Knights goal last week on an empty net. He has a goal and two assists for three points in six games.

“It was a similar situation going to Chicago with the short training camp and not seeing a lot of guys before the start of the year there and it kind of took me about five games there to get my game going,” Janmark said. “It’s really been easy, but the hard part is to maintain it and keep getting better.”

The Golden Knights aren’t counting on Janmark to be a superstar, but they do have expectations of him playing a strong middle-six role. He played on the third-line left wing in his first game as a speed option opposite Alex Tuch, and also spent time on the second-line right wing last week with Reilly Smith.

So far he’s been exactly what Vegas needed and wanted. He’s been here two weeks and he doesn’t have a contract beyond this year’s postseason. The Golden Knights are less worried about that right now, and more concerned with doing everything they can to put him in a position to help them win games.

“For me it’s been seamless, and it usually isn’t,” coach Pete DeBoer said. “We had heard all those things (about his game), but until you actually get the player in your group and on the ice and in games, you never know what that fit’s going to be, but it’s been seamless and he’s going to really help us here.”